Despite macroeconomic challenges, improving Bitcoin network health suggests a reduced likelihood of a prolonged bear market.

The post CryptoQuant analysis suggests bear cycle return is unlikely despite macro headwinds appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The shift in trading dynamics highlights the growing influence of cryptocurrency on traditional markets, challenging established investment norms.

The post Strategy’s trading volume surpasses Berkshire Hathaway’s, marking a new era for Bitcoin proxy stocks appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The escalation in Black Sea tensions threatens commercial shipping and complicates Ukraine's strategic goals, impacting Crimea recapture odds.

The post Russian drone strike on Tanzania-flagged ship kills one, injures three: Ukraine appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Ripple's integration into AI payment protocols could significantly enhance XRP's role in automated transactions, boosting its utility and adoption.

The post Ripple adds XRP payments to Stripe and Coinbase’s x402 AI standard in new developer kit appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Ripple's integration of XRP into AI-driven systems could accelerate its adoption, signaling a shift towards innovative financial solutions.

The post Ripple integrates XRP payments with Stripe and Tempo’s AI standard appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Bitcoin Magazine

Peter Schiff: “The Fed Has Already Lost The Battle Against Inflation” & BTC vs GOLD Debate

Peter Schiff says the bond market didn’t break recently, it broke in 2020, and everything since has been a slow unwind. Across this conversation with Grace Remington and Sean Hagan, he connects rising Treasury yields, the Fed’s expected rate decision, the dollar’s loss of purchasing power, and the central bank rush into gold. He argues that a stock selloff driven by higher rates would be deeply bearish for Bitcoin and the broader crypto market, and that political capital in Washington has already turned against it. The episode ends with Schiff and the hosts going head to head on whether anything actually backs Bitcoin.

00:00 — Peter Schiff says the bond market already broke in 2020
01:44 — How long the Treasury bear market could realistically last
04:18 — What Schiff would enact to actually bring inflation down
06:32 — Spending cuts, higher rates, and the recession nobody will accept
07:39 — Are we in the early stages of a dollar crisis?
08:26 — Rate hike odds and whether Warsh surprises the market
10:51 — Why Schiff calls it a cosmetic hike with no credibility behind it
12:33 — Why gold ran to 5,500 while Bitcoin lagged 23% off its highs
14:20 — Bitcoin priced in gold and the case that it peaked in 2021
17:29 — Tokenized gold vs Bitcoin: counterparty risk and what backs money

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this show are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of BTC Inc., Bitcoin Magazine, or any affiliated entities. This content is provided for informational and educational purposes only and should not be construed as investment, legal, tax, or accounting advice. Nothing contained in this show constitutes a solicitation, recommendation, endorsement, or offer to buy or sell any securities or financial instruments. Viewers should consult their own advisors before making financial or business decisions.

This post Peter Schiff: “The Fed Has Already Lost The Battle Against Inflation” & BTC vs GOLD Debate first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Patrick Green.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Price Wobbles Before Settling After Fed Raises Rates 

Bitcoin’s price swung before settling largely unmoved over a 24-hour period after the Federal Reserve hiked interest rates — as expected — for the first time since 2023. 

The leading cryptocurrency was recently priced at nearly $75,813 after dropping as low as $75,355 in the hour after the U.S. central bank gave its decision to increase the benchmark federal funds rate to a range of 3.75% to 4%. 

Over a seven-day period, the coin is down nearly 4%. 

Traders had bet there was a more than 90% chance that the Fed would raise interest rates ahead of its September meeting. Major Bitcoin trades therefore likely happened before Wednesday. 

Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh didn’t reveal much about the central bank’s next moves but made it clear that price stability in the U.S. was its number one priority. 

“The decision we made today was a sober decision, serious decision, responsible decision, one that we have been preparing for and thinking about in my 110 or 120 days here,” Warsh said. 

He added: “The plain fact is that inflation is too high, and has been for too long. This summer’s inflation readings do not tell me that underlying trends have meaningfully improved.”

Wash — who has previously praised Bitcoin — said last month in his first major speech as head of the U.S. central bank that inflation was too high and had to be brought down. 

The new chair is seemingly going against President Donald Trump’s wishes; the president has repeatedly called for lower interest rates and even threatened to fire the ex-Chair of the Federal Reserve for refusing to do so. 

In a post on his Truth Social platform last week, the president wrote: “We should have the LOWEST RATE of any country in the World, like ‘the old days.'”

When asked by reporters about what he would say to the president, Wash replied: “I’ve got nothing for you on a discussion with the president.”

Bitcoin typically does well in a low interest rate environment because there is more liquidity to buy the asset. 

The U.S. is currently in the midst of an affordability crisis and war in the Middle East has pushed up the price of oil, in turn compounding the problem as the cost of everyday goods in the world’s largest economy rises.

This post Bitcoin Price Wobbles Before Settling After Fed Raises Rates  first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

CFTC Chairman Says Agency Will Write Crypto Rules After Clarity Act Vote Fails

Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chair Mike Selig has said that the top regulator will go ahead and use its powers to advance crypto legislation despite the Clarity Act being blocked. 

In a Wednesday statement released on X, Selig said that the regulator would still help U.S. President Trump “get the job done.” 

Lawmakers blocked the Clarity Act on Tuesday in a procedural vote, with the long-awaited legislation missing the 60 votes needed to advance it. The bill aims to formally divide oversight between regulators, distinguishing which digital assets are securities, commodities or stablecoins. 

“Americans deserve regulatory clarity, legal certainty, and consumer protections in crypto asset markets,” Selig wrote. 

“President Trump promised to deliver a future-proof crypto asset regulatory market structure one way or the other, and we will help him get the job done using our existing statutory authorities.

“The U.S. is and will remain the crypto capital of the world. The CFTC is locked in and ready to ship its rules for the new frontier of finance.”

President Donald Trump last month urged lawmakers to pass the Clarity Act, calling the legislation “very powerful” — but Republicans said that Democrats were deliberately holding it back.  

Regulators are now more crypto-friendly since President Trump appointed them and took the White House and are widely expected to continue pushing rules that help the crypto space. 

The Securities and Exchange Commission last month proposed its own framework for crypto asset offerings, pressing ahead despite a vote on the Clarity Act stalling. 

Despite being passed by the House of Representatives last year, the Clarity Act was in a deadlock for most of this year after the banking lobby clashed with lawmakers and crypto businesses over whether platforms like Coinbase should be able to pay customers yield. 

Some lawmakers have sought to change wording in the bill regarding ethics, and a new bill started circulating in July. The draft bans government officials from promoting and making money from crypto. 

But other Democratic lawmakers said it still fell short; a number of pro-crypto Republicans accused Democrats of deliberately playing politics and delaying the bill. 

This post CFTC Chairman Says Agency Will Write Crypto Rules After Clarity Act Vote Fails first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Is on Sale and Should Be Accumulated, Says Morgan Creek Capital CEO

Morgan Creek Capital CEO Mark Yusko has said that bitcoin’s fair value is $105,000 based on Metcalfe’s Law. 

Speaking on Bitcoin Magazine TV on Wednesday, the investment management firm said that now was the best time to buy the leading cryptocurrency as it is “on sale.” 

Metcalfe’s Law, an observation by Internet entrepreneur Robert Metcalfe, states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users. Bitcoin touched a high in October 2025 of $126,080 but was recently trading 40% lower than that, at $75,701. 

“So the fair value of bitcoin today, based on Metcalf’s law — Tim Peterson runs a model that tracks this really nicely — it’s about $105,000, but it’s $75,000,” Yusko said.  

“Okay, so it’s on sale — you should accumulate things that are on sale.”

Yusko went on to say that bitcoin was the best way to protect one’s value and that investing in companies wasn’t good for the long-term. 

“The problem is over a 30-year period, equity, 85% of companies disappear over 30 years. It’s amazing stat,” he said. 

“What you really need is something to protect your value — and historically, for 5,000 years, there was one asset: gold.”

“Now we’ve got gold and bitcoin,” he added. 

Bitcoin started rallying in August following news that the U.S. Treasury would at least double the size of its liquidity-support buyback operations. The announcement hurt the dollar but non-yielding assets have benefited.  

Since then, some experts have said that the so-called debasement trade — when investors buy an asset as a way to hedge against a currency losing value — is back and will benefit bitcoin. 

The trade was hot last year, and helped bitcoin’s run, but the digital asset lost steam after October as traders turned their attention to stocks related to artificial intelligence. 

This post Bitcoin Is on Sale and Should Be Accumulated, Says Morgan Creek Capital CEO first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

The Quantum Issue: To Freeze Coins Or Not

Bitcoin’s quantum debate is quite a quagmire. This is not merely a technical debate regarding the trade-offs of different types of cryptography and their strengths against a theoretical quantum computer. It is a debate about which properties of Bitcoin’s ethos are strongest when it is faced with a difficult dilemma: uphold the promise that valid coins remain spendable by their owners, or favor supporting the security of the system by not allowing a significant portion of its monetary supply to be raided via a vulnerability that was well known for many years.

The conundrum at the crux of this controversy is that every serious option violates a principle that Bitcoin users care about. Doing nothing may preserve today’s consensus rules while allowing future quantum-capable actors to take coins whose owners never consented. Freezing vulnerable coins may prevent that theft, but it retroactively invalidates long-standing spending conditions. A forced migration to quantum-resistant signatures may be prudent engineering, but it can also look like a deadline-backed confiscation regime. The debate is ugly because there is no clean path that perfectly preserves property rights, economic predictability, censorship resistance, backward compatibility, and user sovereignty all at once.

This is why I consider the problem to be fascinating. It’s multifaceted: simultaneously technical, sociological, philosophical, and economic in nature. Thus any serious discussion of the problem must consider every angle.

Throughout this essay I’ll be making the case that the quantum migration debate is far more nuanced than just a question between freezing or not freezing vulnerable bitcoin. Rather, it’s a question of how to minimize total property-rights violations once elliptic curve signatures no longer reliably authenticate rightful ownership.

The Quantum Threat

Bitcoin’s current authorization scheme to ensure that funds are only spent by their rightful owners depends on elliptic-curve cryptography. Legacy ECDSA signatures and Schnorr signatures both use the secp256k1 elliptic curve. Under ordinary classical computing assumptions, deriving a private key from a public key is computationally infeasible. A cryptographically relevant quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm changes that assumption: once a public key is available, a sufficiently capable quantum attacker could derive the corresponding private key and sign a transaction to spend the funds that would be accepted as valid by the network. Quantum computers threaten to break the public-key-to-private-key hardness assumption behind ECDSA and Schnorr.

That distinction matters because not all Bitcoin outputs expose the same information at the same time. Some output types reveal a public key immediately and remain vulnerable indefinitely. Others hide the public key behind a hash until the owner spends. This creates two broad attack classes. A long-range attack targets outputs whose public keys are already visible on-chain, such as old pay-to-public-key outputs and Taproot outputs. A short-range attack targets coins at the moment of spending: the owner broadcasts a transaction, the public key becomes visible, and a fast quantum attacker attempts to derive the private key quickly enough to replace or front-run the transaction.

The mining threat is different. Grover’s algorithm can in theory speed up brute-force searching for a valid block hash, but it only provides a quadratic speedup while Shor’s algorithm provides a superpolynomial speedup. Thus the competitive advantage is far less practical to bother using a quantum computer for mining.

The Quantum Quantum Threat

Amusingly, the threat of quantum computers is itself in a quantum state of superposition. A quantum computer worth worrying about may or may not be built and no one can prove or disprove that it will happen. Quantum skeptics don’t dispute that Shor’s algorithm could break ECC. They claim there is no good reason to believe we will ever build the kind of powerful, fault-tolerant quantum computer needed to run Shor’s algorithm at a cryptographically relevant scale.

Everyone agrees that breaking ECC isn’t possible with today’s noisy quantum processors. It requires many reliable logical qubits, extremely low error rates, lengthy computations with high coherence, and quantum error correction running successfully at scale.

A strong skeptical argument is that the quantum fault-tolerance threshold theorem depends on assumptions that may not be physically satisfiable with the required precision. Such assumptions include sufficiently independent noise, sufficiently accurate gates, limited unwanted interactions, and the ability to keep errors below an acceptable threshold across a huge system. Mikhail Dyakonov argues that the theorem assumes idealized conditions and does not tell us the real engineering precision needed to satisfy every assumption in an actual device.

Gil Kalai’s criticism is more structural. His argument is that realistic quantum systems may suffer from correlated noise and noise accumulation that prevent the formation of high-quality quantum error-correcting codes. In his 2011 paper, he proposes that physical realizations of quantum codes, correlations in stochastic systems, and accumulated noise could lead to failure of scalable quantum computers.

This may be the strongest skeptic argument: quantum error correction works only if the noise is tameable. If real high-qubit systems generate adversarially correlated errors, then adding more qubits may very well make the computer more fragile and unreliable.

Quantum scalability is a major unknown. Skeptics argue that progress from 50, 100, or 1,000 physical qubits does not automatically extrapolate to millions of physical qubits or thousands of logical qubits. Quantum systems are analog, delicate, and coupled to their environment. The engineering challenge is not just “make more qubits”; it is “make more qubits while suppressing crosstalk, leakage, correlated errors, calibration drift, thermal effects, measurement errors, fabrication variation, and control noise.” This is why critics reject simple timeline extrapolations. They view “we increased qubit count by X this decade, so we will break ECC by year Y” as weak reasoning.

Finally, quantum computer demonstrations have shown that current devices can only outperform classical simulations on carefully selected sampling tasks. Critics have a good point that this says little about executing long, structured algorithms like Shor’s algorithm with enough reliability to recover a 256-bit ECC private key.

Why Post-Quantum Migration Matters

Assuming that a cryptographically relevant quantum computer appears, merely adding the option for Bitcoiners to use post-quantum cryptography won’t be sufficient to stop a quantum attack. The total set of quantum-vulnerable bitcoin includes early pay-to-public-key coins, coins controlled by reused public keys, Taproot outputs, and cases where public keys or extended public keys have been revealed outside the chain. One striking figure is the concentration of BTC in old P2PK outputs, which are a tiny fraction of UTXOs by count but represent a much larger share of value, about 1.7 million BTC. Broader estimates via on-chain analysis of output types, activity patterns, and known ownership lead us to believe that at least 2.6 million BTC would remain vulnerable even if all active Bitcoin users migrated their wallets to post-quantum cryptography.

As such, even with opt-in post-quantum (PQ) cryptography, we should expect there to be a systemic risk sized pool of vulnerable coins lingering indefinitely. These coins could be employed by a quantum attacker to harm the system in a wide variety of ways – not just via selling them and dropping the spot price of BTC. Thus, protecting those vulnerable coins from a quantum threat requires some sort of rule changes that would effectively “lock out” a quantum attacker.

The rhetoric around this issue often uses terms like “confiscation,” “burning,” “freezing,” “stealing,” or “recovery,” but these describe different mechanisms. A freeze would not transfer coins to the state, miners, developers, or some recovery fund. In its most basic form, it would mean changing consensus rules so that certain outputs can no longer be spent using vulnerable ECDSA or Schnorr signatures. That is why advocates sometimes say “burn” rather than “confiscate”: the coins are not reassigned; they become unspendable via their private key. But for a rightful owner who still has the original key, the practical effect can still feel confiscatory: a spend that used to be valid is no longer valid.

BIP-361 divides the migration concept into phases. First, once a quantum-resistant address type exists, the Bitcoin network would stop allowing new coins to be sent to quantum-vulnerable addresses. Later, after a multi-year window, legacy ECDSA and Schnorr spends would become invalid. Finally, there remains the question of recovery options for users who can prove, without solely relying upon broken ECC, that they are the legitimate owner – such as through a zero-knowledge proof derived from a seed phrase or HD wallet structure. The proposal’s primary purpose is not to pick a post-quantum signature algorithm; rather the goal is to create incentives and deadlines so that users, exchanges, custodians, wallets, and institutions actually migrate in a timely fashion and thus allow us to deprecate ECC in order to prevent a quantum attack.

The Case for Freezing

The strongest pro-freeze argument starts from a simple claim: a quantum attacker who derives a private key from a public key is not the legitimate owner in any morally meaningful sense. Under this view, “just let vulnerable coins be taken” is not neutrality; it is allowing a new class of actors to loot old outputs because the protocol failed to strengthen a lock that is known to be weak. Freeze advocates argue that the resulting harm from allowing quantum theft is not just to negligent owners but to all holders, because a successful quantum sweep would redistribute wealth to whoever possesses early quantum capability. This is problematic because that amount of bitcoin in a single actor’s hands who spent relatively little resources to obtain them can be quite dangerous for the ecosystem’s security. Bitcoin’s security model assumes economically rational participants that are incentivized to protect the value of their coins, but a quantum-capable actor has the potential to break that assumption. The pro-freeze position is that Bitcoin should not reward the first entities to break ECC with ammunition that could be leveraged to harm the system.

This argument is especially true for coins believed to be lost. If lost coins are suddenly recoverable by quantum attackers, the circulating supply effectively increases. That does not violate the formal 21 million cap, but it does change the economic landscape: coins that the market may have treated as inert can re-enter circulation, possibly rapidly and in concentrated hands.

The pro-freeze side also argues that the threat is not limited to ordinary profit-seeking. A quantum-capable adversary could attack Bitcoin politically, destabilize markets, undermine public confidence, grief the network for many years, or even acquire enough hashrate to 51% attack the network. Analysis of the game theory in play shows that we can’t simply assume an attacker sweeps vulnerable BTC to sell it and ride off into the sunset; there is a far wider range of strategies and undesirable outcomes.

A related argument is about market panic. Pieter Wuille’s comments in the mailing-list debate sharpen this point: the medium-term danger may be not only an actual cryptographically relevant quantum computer, but the credible belief that one may exist soon. If markets come to believe that a large share of Bitcoin’s supply can be seized at any moment, merely offering voluntary post-quantum outputs may not be enough to restore confidence. A credible plan to disable vulnerable spends could itself be a sufficient reassurance mechanism.

The pro-freeze camp also sees deadlines as necessary because voluntary migration is likely to be slow. People procrastinate; institutions move slowly; hardware wallets, exchanges, custodians, estate plans, multisig coordinators, and cold-storage procedures all need time to implement changes and plan for migrations. Matt Corallo has argued that Bitcoin should add a simple post-quantum capability well in advance of it being necessary, because wallets need to start embedding or committing to quantum-resistant public keys long before any later emergency decision about freezing vulnerable UTXOs becomes credible.

There is also a fiduciary responsibility argument. Public companies, ETFs, custodians, and exchanges will be unable to ignore a known migration deadline. A locked-in consensus change gives compliance departments and risk committees something concrete to act on. It also turns an abstract future threat into a project plan: upgrade software, generate new addresses, move funds, verify backups, communicate with customers, and complete migrations before a known date. BIP-361 explicitly argues that exchanges and custodians would face fiduciary and legal pressure to act once a deadline exists.

It’s also worth noting that all of this migration planning is applicable to more situations than just the emergence of a cryptographically relevant quantum computer. Most of the arguments in this debate apply to ANY situation where ECC is known to have been weakened. Generally speaking, cryptography tends not to withstand the test of time and any given cryptographic algorithm tends to be weakened over long time frames (decades) as researchers find flaws and develop new techniques that break prior assumptions.

Finally, freezing advocates argue that Bitcoin has always depended on users enforcing rules that protect the system as a whole. A soft fork that objectively disables a known-insecure spend path is not the same as arbitrary political confiscation, in their view. The proposed line is not “these people are disfavored” but “these script types require cryptography that no longer meets the bar for Bitcoin’s security assumptions.” If the rule is mechanical, objective, announced years in advance, and paired with a viable migration path, proponents argue that it is more akin to replacing a broken lock than blacklisting an owner.

Anti-freeze Arguments

The strongest anti-freeze argument starts with the opposite premise: Bitcoin’s social contract is that a valid coin remains spendable by the holder of the corresponding key under the consensus rules accepted when the coin was received. Retroactively invalidating that spend path crosses an inviolable line. It turns “not your keys, not your coins” into “not your upgraded-by-deadline, not your coins.” Even if no one else receives the frozen coins, the original owner loses practical control. That is why critics describe forced freezing as confiscatory, not merely protective.

This objection is not just sentimental. Bitcoin’s credibility depends heavily on the expectation that developers and node operators will not pick winners and losers among UTXO owners. A freeze aimed at “vulnerable coins” may be technically objective, but it still targets a subset of owners based on past address choices, wallet design, dormancy, or inability to act. Critics worry that once the network accepts retroactive invalidation for one reason, future coalitions may find other reasons: sanctions, theft recovery, inheritance disputes, state pressure, “obviously” lost coins, or other emergencies.

A second objection is that freezing cannot distinguish between lost coins, careless owners, dormant owners, imprisoned owners, dead owners with heirs, users in hostile jurisdictions, timelocked arrangements, forgotten cold storage, and deliberately long-term savers. Bitcoin has many users whose goal is to avoid being forced to stay online and responsive to policy changes. A person who stored coins safely for decades should not necessarily lose them because the rest of the network later declared their storage method obsolete. It’s worth noting that there is an incentive conflict between active current holders who benefit from reducing the effective supply and inactive rightful owners who may be unable to take action to defend themselves.

A third objection is uncertainty. A cryptographically relevant quantum computer may arrive later than expected, may not arrive in the form feared, may remain secret for some time, or may be countered by less drastic tools. If Bitcoin permanently burns millions of coins and the threat does not materialize on the assumed timeline, the network will have committed an irreversible self-inflicted property-rights violation. Critics therefore argue that premature freezing is worse than measured preparation.

A fourth objection is governance and legitimacy. Freezing vulnerable coins would be one of the most controversial consensus changes in Bitcoin’s history. Some have warned that announcing a freeze of old UTXOs could damage Bitcoin’s image more than a quantum attack itself and could produce a major fork in which one side accepts the freeze and another preserves old spendability. In that scenario, the “solution” creates a new political attack surface: exchanges, custodians, miners, and users must choose which chain’s property-rights model they prefer.

A fifth objection is legal risk. Some participants in the mailing-list debate warned that developers, companies, or miners involved in consciously changing code to freeze funds could face liability claims from owners whose coins become unspendable. Even if those claims ultimately fail, the legal process itself could chill development, divide institutions, and make consensus coordination harder.

A sixth objection is technical humility. Post-quantum cryptography is real, but not free. NIST has standardized ML-DSA, SLH-DSA, and ML-KEM, with more work continuing, yet Bitcoin has unusual constraints: every byte matters, verification cost matters, wallet compatibility matters, and consensus failures are catastrophic. Chaincode’s comparison of candidate schemes in their quantum deep dive report shows why the choice is not trivial: post-quantum signatures and keys can be much larger than Schnorr or ECDSA, and schemes differ sharply in maturity, signature size, public-key size, signing cost, verification cost, and assumptions.

That makes critics wary of forcing migration before the destination is mature. A bad post-quantum migration could reduce throughput, raise fees, bloat the UTXO or witness data burden, introduce new cryptographic assumptions, or force another migration later if the chosen algorithm weakens. Conventional Schnorr signatures are tiny compared with many hash-based post-quantum signatures, while lattice based cryptography has other trade-offs and maturity questions. On a related note, given the larger data sizes of signatures, this will increase the cost of transacting on chain and could price out less wealthy users.

Doing Nothing vs Doing Something

As I stated over a year ago in my first essay on this topic: if quantum computing becomes a threat to Bitcoin’s elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), an inviolable property of Bitcoin will be violated one way or another.

You’re probably familiar with the fundamental principle coined by Andreas Antonopoulos:

“Not your keys, not your coins.”

I posit that the corollary to this principle is:

“Your keys, only your coins.”

The point is that keys don’t merely authorize spending, but that signatures are supposed to be unforgeable evidence of control by the legitimate keyholder. A quantum-capable entity breaks the corollary of this foundational principle. We secure our bitcoin with the mathematical probabilities related to extremely large random numbers. Your funds are only secure because truly random large numbers are safe from being discovered by anyone else in the world.

The do-nothing position is often caricatured as “let quantum thieves steal everything.” Taking a noninterventionist stance against quantum theft is certainly principled: Bitcoin is a voluntary bearer asset governed by rules, and users are responsible for managing known risks. If a coin is encumbered by a script that becomes weak over decades, perhaps that is no different from losing a seed phrase, using weak entropy, trusting an insecure custodian, or failing to follow any number of other best practices. Under this view, the network’s job is not to guarantee the security of every historical locking script forever; rather it’s to enforce the rules as written.

This camp can also state that total supply is the only guarantee of the network, not effective circulating supply. The 21 million cap does not say “21 million minus coins assumed lost.” It says no more than 21 million coins will be issued. If a lost-looking coin later moves because its key is found, inherited, cracked through poor entropy, or recovered through quantum attack, the total issued supply has not changed. That argument is unsatisfying to people who see quantum funds sweeping as theft, but it is internally consistent: protocol rules define validity, not subjective moral beliefs about rightful ownership.

The do-nothing side also values operational simplicity. Any freezing rule requires defining what constitutes a vulnerable bitcoin redeem script, choosing activation dates, coordinating wallets and miners, communicating to users, handling edge cases, and absorbing political fallout. Doing nothing avoids a contentious consensus change. If post-quantum tools become available, users who care can migrate voluntarily, while users who do not migrate bear their own risk.

But the weakness of the “pure do-nothing” perspective is that it treats quantum theft as an individual-risk problem when it may actually become a system-risk problem. If enough coins are exposed, and if the market believes a capable attacker can use them to harm the ecosystem, the damage is not confined to owners who failed to migrate. It affects public confidence in the system which then cascades into negative pressure on the exchange rate, thermodynamic security (miner revenue,) and the revenue of many Bitcoin businesses. That is why even many people uncomfortable with freezing still support early preparation.

Apathetic “code is law” Bitcoiners are free to do nothing, but they should not delude themselves into thinking that they can stop others from trying to do something.

Alternative Proposals

Because “freeze all vulnerable UTXOs” and “do nothing” are both brutal in their own ways, much of the interesting work is in alternative proposals that would help users retain their property rights in the face of a quantum threat.

1. We could prevent new vulnerable outputs while not yet freezing old ones. This is the least coercive part of forced migration. Once a safer output type exists, consensus or policy rules could discourage or even disallow sending bitcoin into vulnerable locking scripts. That reduces future damage without immediately invalidating old property claims. BIP-361 includes this as Phase A, and several critics are more open to this kind of forward-looking restriction than to permanent retroactive burns.
2. Alternatively, the network could enforce a temporary lock rather than permanent burn. Boris Nagaev suggested that if old EC spends must be disabled, the lock could include a future re-enable height or some other mechanism that gives the community time to build recovery paths. Conduition explored how such a phase might interact with P2QRH/P2MR-like outputs and warned that simply banning all EC checks could accidentally affect hybrid constructions unless the rule is designed carefully. The appeal of a temporary lock is political as much as technical: it signals emergency containment rather than permanent confiscation.
3. Another option is rate-limiting, represented by the Hourglass proposal. Hourglass V2 focuses on old P2PK coins and would restrict spending so that only one P2PK input could be spent per block, with a net limit of one BTC per block from those outputs. Its authors present it as a way to avoid both immediate burning and unconstrained quantum liquidation: coins are not destroyed, but their ability to flood the market is throttled. The proposal estimates that unconstrained P2PK sweeping could be extremely fast, while the one-BTC-per-block design would stretch full P2PK movement over decades.
   
   Hourglass has its own critics. Opponents argue that it still violates permissionless spending by imposing special restrictions on a class of otherwise valid coins. It may also create a long-running race between legitimate owners and quantum attackers rather than resolving ownership. Some critics say that if the quantum threat is real, taking decades to clear exposed P2PK outputs gives attackers plenty of time; if the threat is not real, the rule is needless interference.
4. There is the concept of commit-delay-reveal, sometimes discussed through Guy Fawkes-style constructions. The basic idea is that a user first commits to a future spend in a way that a quantum attacker cannot exploit immediately, waits for the commitment to become deeply confirmed, and later reveals the secret needed to validate the spend. This can prevent a short-exposure quantum attacker from seeing a public key and instantly stealing the coin before confirmation. Chaincode describes commit-delay-reveal as opt-in and potentially useful, while the Optech summary notes that these schemes can let safely spendable bitcoins avoid destruction and reduce migration urgency.
5. Quantum safe funds recovery without EC signatures, especially for HD wallets, should be feasible. Or Sattath and others discussed “signature lifting” ideas where the owner proves knowledge of a seed or derivation path rather than proving control through the vulnerable public key. Olaoluwa Osuntokun built a proof-of-concept using zk-STARKs to prove that a Taproot BIP-86 output key was generated from a BIP-32 seed path. This would certainly be a last resort scenario for procrastinators to recover funds, given that the latest optimized version of the scheme requires a 200 KB proof. It would certainly price out recovery of small UTXOs, because a best case scenario would likely cost several hundred dollars in transaction fees but could easily run into the thousands or tens of thousands at higher transaction fee rates.
   
   This recovery path is attractive because it changes the moral shape of the debate. If rightful owners can later recover frozen coins through non-EC proofs, freezing no longer has to mean permanent destruction. But the costs are serious: large proofs, complex verification, privacy leakage, wallet-derivation assumptions, inability to cover every historical wallet type, and the danger of adding novel cryptography to Bitcoin consensus. Critics of the zk-STARK approach emphasized that megabyte-scale proofs and multi-second verification times are difficult to reconcile with Bitcoin’s conservative design.Though further research is already finding optimizations that are more efficient.
6. Dual-signature or market-driven migration. Marc Johnson and others suggested enabling quantum-resistant outputs, allowing optional dual signatures, giving fee or policy incentives, and letting users choose their own risk instead of imposing a hard loss deadline. This approach preserves property rights better than forced freezing, but it won’t solve the systemic-risk problem if too many high-value coins remain exposed.

Tricky Technical Trade-offs

The migration debate cannot be fully separated from the choice of quantum-resistant signatures because the size of signatures will affect the system throughput. NIST’s post-quantum standards provide a serious foundation: FIPS 204 standardizes ML-DSA, FIPS 205 standardizes SLH-DSA, and FIPS 203 covers ML-KEM for key establishment. But Bitcoin needs digital signatures and script-compatible ownership proofs, not just general-purpose cryptographic standards. A scheme suitable for TLS or government communications is not automatically ideal for a blockchain with limited block space and global verification requirements.

Hash-based signatures are conservative and appealing because their assumptions are simple, but they are large. Lamport-style signatures can be enabled in some form with script upgrades such as OP_CAT, but the Taproot key-path problem remains: if a Taproot output has a quantum-vulnerable key path, placing a Lamport signature in the script path does not make the whole output quantum safe unless the vulnerable key path is removed or disabled. BIP-347’s OP_CAT discussion explicitly notes this problem.

Lattice signatures such as ML-DSA offer more compact signatures than many hash-based options, but they bring different assumptions and implementation risks. Falcon-style signatures are compact but historically more delicate to implement. SPHINCS+/SLH-DSA is conservative but large. Experimental schemes may be attractive on paper but too immature for Bitcoin consensus. This is why a credible migration plan likely needs algorithm agility, test deployments, wallet experiments, careful fee modeling, and perhaps multiple acceptable post-quantum paths rather than a single rushed winner.

The block space problem is severe but not intractable. Chaincode estimates that migrating all UTXOs would take roughly 76 to 142 days if migration consumed all block space, and 305 to 568 days if it consumed 25% of block space. That is just raw migration throughput; it does not include human coordination, wallet upgrades, institutional approvals, support for air-gapped signing, hardware replacement, accounting workflows, etc.

A full timeline for UTXO set migration is measured in years, not weeks. Chaincode’s high-level estimate sketches a best case of roughly five years and a worst case closer to fifteen years for research, BIP work, implementation, deployment, and migration. The same report notes that in an emergency the timeframe could potentially be accelerated to 2 years, but historical emergency protocol fixes are not really analogous because the quantum migration problem touches every layer of the ecosystem.

The Ethics of Property Rights

The moral disagreement comes from two competing definitions of ownership.

The anti-freeze side supports a “code is law” perspective: ownership means control under the consensus rules. If an output is spendable by an ECDSA or Schnorr signature, then disabling that spend path violates the owner’s property rights. The network does not know whether a coin is lost, abandoned, inherited, intentionally dormant, or inaccessible for temporary reasons. Therefore, freezing is collective punishment imposed on a subset of users for failing to follow a new migration demand.

The pro-freeze side says ownership cannot mean “anyone who can break the cryptography gets the coin.” Bitcoin’s signatures are intended to authenticate the legitimate keyholder, not to create a prize for whoever first builds a machine that defeats the authentication scheme. If quantum capability turns public keys into private keys, then an EC signature no longer carries the same moral information it carried before. Under this view, refusing to freeze is not neutrality; it is a security failure to knowingly allow a compromised authentication mechanism to transfer wealth.

Both positions are coherent. The first protects rule stability and bearer-asset finality. The second protects the deeper intent of the locking script. The painful point is that Bitcoin’s consensus rules are the only practical arbiter. The protocol cannot read intent. It can only accept or reject transactions according to rules. Any attempt to encode “rightful ownership” after ECC breaks either becomes overly broad, relies on new proofs, or leaves some victims behind.

I submit that property rights have been violated on Bitcoin before. Allow me to introduce you to the Value Overflow Incident as it is commonly known.

On August 15 2010, it was discovered that block 74,638 contained a transaction that created 184,467,440,737.09551616 bitcoin for three different addresses. Two addresses received 92.2 billion bitcoins each, and whoever solved the block got an extra 0.01 BTC that did not exist prior to the transaction. This was possible because the code used for checking transactions before including them in a block didn’t account for the case of outputs so large that they overflowed when summed.

A new version of the client was published within five hours of the discovery that contained a soft-forking change to the consensus rules that rejected output value overflow transactions. The blockchain was forked. Although many unpatched nodes continued to build on the “bad” blockchain, the “good” blockchain overtook it at a block height of 74,691 at which point all nodes accepted the “good” blockchain as the authoritative source of Bitcoin transaction history.

The bad transaction no longer exists for people using the chain with the greatest cumulative proof of work. Therefore, the bitcoins created by it do not exist either.

Thus, from a pure property rights perspective, the person who followed the rules of the network at the time had their property confiscated from them because the overwhelming majority of other actors on the network considered their action to be undesirable and a threat to the network.

Anti-freeze folks will likely say that this is not a problem because the INTENT of protocol rules is what matters, and the intent was for the network to guarantee a maximum supply of 21 million BTC. I would tend to agree, and make the counter-claim that the INTENT of using ECC to secure BTC is to ensure that it’s infeasible for anyone to guess your private key.

Economic Stakes

A sudden sweep of funds by a quantum-capable entity could affect Bitcoin through several channels.

1. Coins thought dormant would re-enter circulation, increasing the effective bitcoin supply.
2. Markets could panic before any actual sweep if credible evidence appears that a CRQC exists or is near.
3. Miners could be affected if price falls sharply, because their budget is tied to block subsidies and fees in BTC terms converted into operating revenue.
4. Exchanges and other businesses could face operational stress and massive drops in revenue if customer deposits are exposed or if market structure breaks under uncertainty.

“Lost coins only make everyone else’s coins worth slightly more. Think of it as a donation to everyone.” – Satoshi Nakamoto

If true, the corollary is:

“Quantum recovered coins only make everyone else’s coins worth less. Think of it as a theft from everyone.”

If a large amount of BTC is permanently lost, remaining holders benefit from a lower effective circulating supply. If quantum attackers revive those coins, remaining holders lose that benefit. Critics of freezing respond that this is exactly why active holders have a conflict of interest: they may prefer burning dormant coins because it makes their own coins scarcer. That is not a trivial objection. A freeze can be framed as protecting the network, but it can also be framed as enriching active holders at the expense of inactive ones.

That conflict is why the specific definition of vulnerable coins matters greatly. Freezing only ancient P2PK outputs with already exposed public keys is easier to justify than freezing every vulnerable output, because the funds are far more likely to be lost. Freezing Taproot outputs is more complicated politically because Taproot is recent and intentionally adopted by users who were following modern wallet guidance. Freezing reused outputs raises another problem: the vulnerability may come from user behavior rather than address type. Freezing based on on-chain public key leakage is also a half measure because the chain can not know what was leaked off-chain; many wallets share their xpubs with third parties, for example.

A broad freeze could therefore be both underinclusive and overinclusive. It could miss off-chain exposed keys while capturing dormant but legitimate owners. A narrow freeze could reduce the worst risk but leave enough vulnerable value to sustain panic. This is why I believe the optimal solution is complex and requires a multi-phased approach, rescue proofs, and objective script rules rather than discretionary address lists.

Herding Cats

Bitcoin is an anarchic system of rules without rulers. It has no authority that can dictate changes to consensus rules. A rule to deprecate ECC would need broad agreement among node operators, miners, exchanges, wallets, custodians, merchants, and users. In formal terms, many proposals are soft forks: they make previously valid spends invalid under stricter rules. But in social terms, a soft fork that disables old coins is much heavier than an ordinary tightening rule. It directly affects property expectations.

This governance problem gets worse under emergency conditions. If Bitcoin waits until there is credible proof of a CRQC, the community may have to act during panic, misinformation, market stress, and adversarial pressure. But if Bitcoin acts too early, it risks freezing coins before the threat is real enough to justify it. Chaincode explicitly warns that planning and communication should happen before the threat becomes acute, while also acknowledging that stakeholder coordination, regulation, taxation, and user communication are major obstacles.

This creates a paradox. The best time to design a quantum migration is before it is urgently needed. The hardest time to persuade people to accept controversial measures is also before they are urgently needed. Once the emergency is obvious, technical and social options narrow dramatically. In short, because: Bitcoin moves slowly, some action must happen before the relevant computer arrives if we want a non-chaotic outcome.

A credible process therefore matters almost as much as the final rule. The community would need clear definitions, simulations, reference implementations, wallet support, testnet deployments, activation thresholds, recovery research, and communication to nontechnical users. Without that, an ECC deprecation proposal would look like coordination against dormant holders. With it, even opponents could at least evaluate concrete trade-offs instead of reacting to abstractions.

Governance Game Theory

The threat of a quantum attacker is similar to The DAO incident that Ethereum had to deal with in 2016. In other words: the ecosystem had time (about a month) to take action to stop an attacker from getting away with taking ownership of 5% of all ETH at the time. For 5% of all ETH to go into the hands of a malicious actor was considered to be a systemic risk.

To put this in context, from my own analysis of the blockchain I think a reasonable estimate for the number of lost coins with exposed public keys is roughly 2,600,000 BTC, or 13% of the current total supply. In other words, this is about how much BTC I expect would be unable to migrate to a quantum safe locking script if we come to consensus on implementing a post-quantum signature scheme.

However, note a crucial difference between the DAO situation and this one. With the DAO, the Ethereum community had to hard fork in order to regain control of stolen tokens. With a BIP-361 style change, it would be a soft fork. Which is to say:

Opposing the DAO fork was relatively easy: needed not to do anything and stayed on the chain with the original set of rules. That chain is now known as Ethereum Classic.

Opposing a quantum migration soft fork, assuming it has a supermajority of hashrate, would require dissenting users to coordinate a User Rejected Soft Fork, which has never been done before.

The Slippery Slope of Centralization

Some have stated that a forced migration proposal like BIP-361 is untenable because it would set precedent for “centralized planning” over who gets to use Bitcoin. In other words, this could lead to similar types of freezing to stop anyone who is considered a “bad actor” from using the system, such as in response to major thefts and hacks.

We already know that nothing about Bitcoin’s rules is truly immutable. It’s not possible to create a protocol that is impossible to change – the best you can do is to align incentives that make it unlikely to change. In the case of proposing changes as controversial as altering ownership / the money supply, you should expect that such proposals only have the slightest glimmer of being accepted if the alternative is expected to be detrimental to nearly all Bitcoiners.

As for the claim that it will lead to protocol-level confiscation in response to hacks and such, it’s simply not possible for an ecosystem as distributed as Bitcoin to coordinate a response fast enough to outpace an individual actor. To be more precise: trying to blacklist a specific address / set of addresses is infeasible because the “target” of such a protocol-level blacklist would simply move their funds faster than the ecosystem could coordinate freezing them.

Prior Precedents

The DAO was a special case in which a decentralized community actually had time to react to a massive theft, because The DAO’s smart contract essentially had a “cooldown rule” that made them have to wait for a month after initially redirecting funds into their own control before they could send them anywhere else, such as to “cash out.” As such, there was time to gather consensus from the wider ecosystem (they even conducted coin voting) in order to pass a pretty controversial hard fork.

What was the end result? We can actually observe how the market reacted. Despite all of the controversy, the economic reality was clear. Ethereum Classic, which abided by “code is law” and “do nothing” perspective, allowing the attacker to retain control of 5% of the network’s tokens, struggled to even reach 10% of the market value of interventionist Ethereum, which changed the rules of the network in order to return funds to their rightful owners.

As previously mentioned, Bitcoin also had the Value Overflow Incident in which bitcoin created by someone who was just “following the rules of the protocol” had them taken away by a coordinated consensus change.

These are stark examples of why I believe that economic incentives can and will trump moral and philosophical principles. Some will surely say that Ethereum and Bitcoin have little in common, and it’s certainly true that these different networks tend to have very different ethos and driving factors. But from an economic perspective, they share the same incentive structures with regard to a malicious entity controlling a substantial portion of the market cap. Bitcoin in 2026 is a very different ecosystem from Bitcoin in 2016. Consider all of the new entrants, many of which did not adopt BTC as a result of the libertarian standpoint.

It’s a pretty tough sell to get mainstream audiences to believe that bad actors should not be stopped if there is a means to do so. It’s an even tougher sell to tell companies and institutions that are making millions if not billions of dollars off of managing an asset that they should stand idly by and watch an existential threat to their business line carry out an attack that can be prepared for not just months, but potentially years or decades ahead of time.

Framing Matters

I think the worst possible framing of this debate is “quantum safety versus irresponsible users.” That trivializes the property-rights objection. Another terrible framing in my mind is “freezing is always theft, therefore no preparation is needed.” That trivializes the systemic-risk problem and overlooks the options we have to help protect property rights.

Matt Corallo has astutely pointed out that the debate over deprecating the use of vulnerable signatures is interesting because it can be framed in very different ways that sound the same on the surface.

1. “Protect people’s property rights to the greatest extent possible.”
2. “Don’t freeze anyone’s coins.”

The first perspective supports freezing ECC spends while also adding the maximum number of ways to safely recover funds (BIP-32 proofs, pre-Q-day commitments for non-BIP-32 wallets and timelocked coin wallets, etc).

The second stance actually minimizes the number of people who get to keep their coins and maximizes theft exposure. But it’s far simpler and avoids a controversial fork.

Thus I think this is not a binary debate of “to freeze or not to freeze.” Rather, a superior framing of the problem is: what is the optimal set of rules that minimizes property rights violations under conditions where the original cryptographic authentication mechanism is no longer reliable to authenticate rightful ownership?

Under that framing, deprecation of ECDSA signatures becomes more defensible if several conditions are met.

1. There must be a widely reviewed quantum-resistant destination. Users cannot be coerced to migrate into a half-baked or experimental mechanism. The destination may be P2MR plus future PQ script paths, a standardized and well-vetted PQ signature type, a commit-reveal construction, or a hybrid. But it must be usable by ordinary wallets and institutions, not just technically imaginable.
2. The migration window must be long enough for real-world users. Our block space throughput estimates show that raw transaction capacity is only one bottleneck. A serious deadline must account for wallet upgrades, hardware devices, multisig coordination, inheritance, institutional controls, cold storage logistics, and fee spikes. A five-year window may sound long in software terms but may be short for global bearer-asset migration.
3. The deprecation rule should be as objective and narrow as possible. Freezing by named addresses or presumed identity would be poisonous. Freezing by clearly vulnerable spend conditions is more defensible, though still controversial. Even then, designers must avoid accidentally disabling hybrid or recovery constructions that still use EC operations in non-dangerous ways.
4. Frozen funds rescue options are mandatory. A permanent burn maximizes clarity but also maximizes moral injury. Temporary locks, seed-knowledge proofs, commit-reveal paths, or other non-EC ownership proofs may preserve more of Bitcoin’s property-rights ethos. The current recovery ideas are not mature enough to rely on, but they are critical because they change a binary burn-versus-steal choice into a more humane migration path.
5. The community should define warning criteria in advance while accepting that perfect evidence may never arrive. A public CRQC demonstration against secp256k1 would be too late for some attack classes. But vague fear is not enough to justify burning coins. Reasonable criteria might include credible advances in fault-tolerant quantum error correction, government migration deadlines, expert cryptanalytic consensus, observed market stress, or other public signals. The NSA and NIST transitions show that major institutions already consider post-quantum migration a serious planning problem, but institutional caution is not the same as proof that Bitcoin must freeze coins now.

A Goldilocks Problem

A common critique of BIP-361 (other than “quantum computers aren’t real”) is that it is “rushed.” I think this is due to people making incorrect assumptions around activation. No one is claiming that BIP-361 should be activated today or even soon… it’s not even possible until a PQC scheme is activated. Rather, the point of BIP-361 is to have a contingency plan in place in case it looks like the threat is real and a migration becomes desirable.

We settled on a five year migration timeframe for BIP-361 because there are cons to migrating too early and to migrating too late. Migrate too early and we may be imposing great costs upon the ecosystem when it’s not necessary. Also, since post-quantum schemes and quantum safe funds rescue schemes are under active research, migrating too soon could lock us into a suboptimal solution. Migrate too late and we leave the ecosystem open to a systemic threat that could cause massive harm and loss of confidence in the network. We also know it needs to be a multi-year approach because of how long it takes for protocol changes to propagate throughout the ecosystem.

I don’t expect anyone to seriously suggest BIP-361 for activation unless it looks highly likely that a cryptographically relevant quantum computer is less than 10 years away.

Deprecation of ECC could eventually become defensible, but only as a last-resort consensus choice after a viable migration path exists, after objective rules are specified, after a long public deadline is published, and after rough consensus is achieved that allowing vulnerable coins to remain spendable via ECC would create greater rights violations than disabling it.

The most intellectually honest conclusion is that both sides of this debate are defending Bitcoin’s principles, just with slightly different interpretations. The ECC deprecation side defends protocol security, system survival, and property rights against quantum attacks. The do-nothing side defends protocol rule stability, censorship resistance, and the rights of inactive users.

The Path Forward

Bitcoin’s quantum problem is not urgent in the sense that users should panic today. It is urgent in the sense that decentralized systems must solve hard coordination problems before they become emergencies. Waiting until a quantum attacker is visible will leave us with the worst set of possible choices.

The next steps for the foreseeable future do not include BIP-361. Rather, we should focus on preparation:

1. reduce address reuse
2. research recovery proofs
3. reduce reliance on xpub sharing
4. research more optimized PQ schemes
5. activate opt-in quantum safe locking scripts
6. develop multiple contingency plans to prepare for various scenarios

Bitcoin’s quantum migration debate is not a choice between respecting property rights and violating them. It is a choice between competing kinds of property-rights failure. We should treat the quantum threat as a realistic but unquantifiable systemic risk, but not use uncertainty as a premise for premature controversial changes.

Even if a cryptographically relevant quantum computer fails to emerge, showing that Bitcoin takes tail risks seriously will boost confidence in the network and reduce uncertainty about its future.

This piece is featured in the latest Print edition of Bitcoin Magazine, The Quantum Issue. We’re sharing it here as an early look at the ideas explored throughout the full issue.

This post The Quantum Issue: To Freeze Coins Or Not first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Shinobi.

Chainflip will set affected liquidity providers’ active TRON USDT balances to zero under a restart plan responding to the 736,442.17 USDT exploit it disclosed on Sept. 12.

The cross-chain swap protocol will first record each provider’s pre-migration balance separately on-chain, preserving the amount Chainflip says it owes even though the active account will read zero. Repayment remains pending.

By Sept. 16, Chainflip said swaps and quoting had resumed across the rest of the network while TRON remained excluded. The service restart leaves providers on the affected route waiting for both the accounting migration and a recovery process.

Chainflip said the attacker removed the USDT from its TRON vault between 01:44 and 03:10 UTC on Sept. 12 by causing six liquidity-provider withdrawals to be paid twice.

The attack exploited how the protocol read instructions attached to TRON transfers. Chainflip said the attacker submitted a transaction its validators had already signed and added a malformed memo. Software monitoring the transfer interpreted the memo as a failed swap and issued a refund on top of the ordinary withdrawal.

The protocol said the TRON vault now holds far less USDT than providers are owed. The restart plan therefore separates the live account balance from the amount tracked for recovery.

How Chainflip will account for the shortfall

Chainflip’s migration plan calls for closing its open TRON/USDT orders and strategies and unwinding related loans and lending positions. The protocol and its software release use the label “trxUSDT” for USDT on TRON.

Each provider’s pre-migration trxUSDT amount will then be written to a separate on-chain balance before the active account balance is reset. Chainflip said this separate record keeps the amount owed available for future payouts.

The recorded amount is distinct from a completed reimbursement, and the provider’s live trxUSDT account will display zero after the migration.

Chainflip has pledged to make affected providers whole. Its public updates do not identify a funding source or payout schedule, document completed payments, or state a definitively recovered amount.

The protocol said it patched the vulnerability by limiting which TRON transfers can carry swap instructions in a memo. The new logic accepts memos attached to a plain TRX transfer or a direct TRC-20 token transfer. It excludes transfers wrapped inside another contract call, blocking the route used to trigger the extra refund.

Chainflip said all other funds were unaffected. The disclosed shortfall, position unwind, and balance reset apply specifically to trxUSDT liquidity providers.

The post Chainflip to reset TRON USDT provider balances to zero following $736,000 exploit appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Avalanche’s Helicon upgrade is scheduled to give validators shorter, auto-renewing commitments while raising the uptime cutoff for rewards and reducing returns at the shortest durations.

The network upgrade is set to activate on Avalanche Mainnet on Sept. 22 at 15:00 UTC. Validators must install AvalancheGo v1.15.0 beforehand to remain compatible with the upgraded chain.

What changes for validators

Helicon will cut the minimum Primary Network validation period from 336 hours to 48 hours. It will also let eligible validators automatically begin another cycle when the current one ends, reducing manual signing work and potential reward gaps from repeatedly leaving and rejoining the validator set.

Operators can choose how much of each cycle’s reward to compound into the next one and can update the configuration for a future cycle. That creates a way to combine brief capital commitments with continuous validation, instead of choosing between a long lockup and repeated manual restaking.

The feature applies only to the validator’s own stake. Delegations will not auto-renew, and each delegation must fit inside one validator cycle because the validator is not guaranteed to continue beyond that boundary.

Validation periods that start on or after Helicon activation must achieve at least 90% uptime to earn rewards, up from 80%. The rule is not retroactive: periods that began before activation remain subject to the existing 80% requirement even if they extend beyond Sept. 22.

Avalanche's uptime measurement will not change, and rewards will remain all or nothing. Falling below the applicable threshold forfeits the full reward for that period, though the validator’s principal is not slashed.

For a validator using auto-renewal, missing the threshold has an additional consequence. The position will not roll into another cycle, and the validator will exit. Its principal and rewards accrued in earlier cycles are returned, but the failed cycle’s reward is lost.

Short cycles reduce how long capital is committed, while the higher threshold raises the operational reliability required to collect each cycle’s reward and continue automatically. For operators, that links continuity to cycle-by-cycle performance without changing how Avalanche measures peer responsiveness or adding a partial-reward buffer.

How short-duration Avalanche rewards change

Helicon will also begin a 90-day adjustment to Avalanche’s reward curve. The protocol’s minimum consumption rate, an input that helps determine staking rewards, is scheduled to decline linearly from 10% to 7.5%. The maximum rate at the one-year duration will remain unchanged.

Avalanche’s modeling estimates that this adjustment will reduce the annualized reward rate at the shortest duration by about 1.3% after the phase-in. The exact realized yield will remain variable because it depends on factors including AVAX supply, duration, and compounding choices.

The same modeling projects annual AVAX inflation falling by roughly 0.5% to 1% and the stake-weighted average duration increasing by about two months. Those outcomes are estimates depending on how validators and delegators respond.

The mechanical trade-off is more certain: Helicon makes short, renewable validator commitments easier to use, but sets a lower reward at the short end while preserving the one-year rate and demands more reliable uptime for new validation periods.

The post Avalanche’s Helicon upgrade cuts validator lockups from 14 days to 48 hours appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Ethereum validators rely on independently built consensus clients to agree on the chain, and that diversity is a safety feature. If a defect affects a client used by too much of the network, Ethereum can stop finalizing blocks or, under more extreme conditions, finalize the wrong chain.

Yet a Sept. 16 snapshot of one client-diversity dashboard offered three incompatible answers about which client had the largest share. Clientdiversity.org showed Blockprint estimating Teku at 99.83%, Miga Labs estimating Lighthouse at 51.32%, and Rated estimating Teku at 53.86%.

Those are readings coming from different proxies, and one is attached to a tool its developer now calls defunct. Ethereum researchers are exploring stronger validator privacy.

A Lean-chain research proposal would use fresh validator keys each day and hide links between deposits, validator activity and withdrawals, weakening some of the traces used to measure operator and stake concentration.

The central question is whether Ethereum can replace imperfect surveillance with authenticated aggregate reporting before those persistent identifiers disappear.

Why the disputed numbers matter

Ethereum.org’s client-diversity guidance describes two distinct failure levels.

A bug in a consensus client used by more than 33% of nodes could prevent finality, a liveness failure that leaves users unable to rely on transactions as irreversible.

A critical bug in a client with a two-thirds majority could cause an incorrect split chain to finalize, a safety failure that could leave validators facing slashing or an expensive exit-and-re-entry process.

The public guidance uses node share as shorthand. Researchers seeking a consensus-risk measure care about the distribution across validators and their voting weight, because a simple count of visible machines does not show how much stake backs each client.

The Sept. 16 snapshot did not provide that clean, stake-weighted answer.

Sigma Prime’s archived repository says the classifier is no longer accurate after Ethereum’s Electra upgrade and considers the project defunct. Clientdiversity.org nevertheless labeled the Blockprint panel as updated daily.

Miga measures a different signal. Its Ant crawler discovers peers and requests client metadata. Firewalls, refused connections, discovery gaps, and rotating peer IDs can limit coverage. One node can serve many validators, so a node sample does not reveal how much stake is behind each observation.

Rated’s documentation shows a separate attribution problem. For operator-level analysis, Rated groups validator keys by deposit address, then maps those groups to entities using transaction research, block graffiti and voluntary disclosure.

Rated says there is no standard method for that higher-order mapping. Its operator attribution is not an explanation of the client estimate displayed on clientdiversity.org, but it shows how much concentration analysis can depend on persistent public links.

Client concentration, operator concentration and stake concentration are related but not interchangeable. A large operator can diversify across clients, while nominally separate validators can share one operator, hosting provider, or software stack.

Ethereum Lean privacy would change what observers can measure

Buterin’s July research post proposes moving much of Ethereum’s per-validator accounting into zero-knowledge proofs. Under its privacy phase, the active validator registry would be rebuilt each day, validators would register fresh keys, and no long-term validator index would remain.

Balance updates and withdrawal conditions would be proven with ZK-STARKs. Deposits would use hiding commitments so a withdrawal address is not publicly linked to earlier validator activity.

Buterin described the result as strong validator anonymity. In the discussion, he also acknowledged that privacy can hide centralization, while suggesting that large operations may still leak enough aggregate data to be identifiable.

Ethereum’s broader privacy roadmap describes several protocol changes as active work or candidates under consideration, and says the roadmap is unfinished and subject to change.

Daily key changes would disrupt methods that assume a validator can be followed over time. Hiding deposit and withdrawal links would also erode deposit-address grouping used in some operator attribution.

Miga’s crawler observes network peers rather than relying on long-lived validator keys. A block classifier looks for behavior rather than identity. Neither method would automatically disappear because keys rotate, although new protocol and client behavior could make their signals less reliable.

Blockprint’s failure after Electra already shows how a protocol change can invalidate a fingerprint.

A 2025 USENIX study reported that four observer nodes located more than 15% of Ethereum validators in the peer-to-peer network during a three-day measurement. That experiment shows how network traces can reveal hosting concentration, but also why preserving those traces creates privacy and targeting risks.

A research path exists for publishing aggregate client shares without revealing each validator’s choice, but it does not yet solve authentication.

A Nethermind research project explored private voting for client reporting. Validators could encrypt their client choices, prove their ballots are structurally valid, and allow a set of authorities to recover only the aggregate. The design considered homomorphic encryption, distributed key generation, and zero-knowledge proofs.

An IETF research draft on verifiable distributed aggregation describes related cryptographic tools for private sums, histograms, groupings, and heavy hitters. These primitives can validate the form of a submitted measurement while hiding the individual input.

Multiplexed setups and distributed validators may also use more than one consensus or execution client, making an honest report more complex than a single label. Nethermind’s post identifies sampling, fake data, software attestation, decryption authorities, and performance as unresolved design questions.

Private client aggregate reporting could show whether a client crossed a warning threshold without revealing individual validators, yet still miss that one company controlled many unrelated keys. Client share and operator share need separate authenticated measurements. Neither the Lean post nor the private-reporting research specifies a complete operator-concentration system.

Ethereum can make validators more private without abandoning its client-diversity safety discipline, but measurement must become an explicit part of the privacy design. That means stake-authenticated reporting, verifiable aggregation, published uncertainty, and separate treatment of client, operator, and stake concentration.

Daily re-anonymization would expose how much the current picture already depends on incompatible estimates and public traces that privacy research is meant to remove.

The post Ethereum’s client diversity picture fractures under incompatible estimates appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Circle has scheduled the public launch of Arc for Sept. 16, giving USDC a network where the same dollar balance can fund both payments and transaction fees. That could remove a common obstacle to using stablecoins, giving Circle a possible way to attract additional USDC demand as it competes with Tether.

The public-mainnet rollout follows a private network that Circle said had more than 100 ecosystem and institutional builders in August.

Arc's public testnet opened on Oct. 28, 2025. Today's scheduled milestone is the move to a public production network, where its design can face a broader commercial test.

One balance for payments and fees

Arc is a layer-1 blockchain, meaning it operates its own network. Its documentation describes an Ethereum-compatible environment built around stablecoin transactions, with USDC as the asset used to pay network fees and transactions designed to become final in less than a second.

On many Ethereum-compatible chains, someone can have enough USDC to make a payment yet lack the separate token needed to pay the network fee. Acquiring that second asset adds another step before the payment can move.

Arc's USDC model combines those functions. A user holds USDC, sends USDC, and pays the fee from the same underlying balance. Developers can use familiar Ethereum tools while building an application whose spending and fee requirements are expressed in the same asset.

For a payment product, that could simplify onboarding and balance management. It gives USDC an operational role in every fee-paying transaction on the network, beyond being an asset an application happens to support.

The wallet integration guidance also makes clear that USDC's native and token interfaces represent the same holding. They are two ways for software to access one balance, so displaying them as separate pots of money would double-count the user's funds.

This makes the fee payable in the asset the user already intends to spend.

Arc combines open developer access with a permissioned validator set. Anyone can build applications under that model, while the operators responsible for validating the network are selected.

Circle's announced founding validator cohort includes BlackRock, DTCC, Visa, Mastercard, Standard Chartered, and other financial companies alongside Circle. That places institutional participation within the network's operating design.

For businesses considering blockchain settlement, the proposed role of those institutions is part of what distinguishes Arc. It also means that permissionless application access should not be confused with permissionless participation in validation.

The roster and private-mainnet builder count describe participation, but they cannot show how much demand a public launch will generate.

Arc also advertises opt-in privacy, but its execution documentation still lists Arc Privacy Sector and Stablecoin Services as planned and unavailable.

Arc's route to additional USDC demand

Circle reported $73.3 billion of USDC in circulation at the end of June, while Tether reported approximately $184.6 billion of USDT issued at the same quarter-end. These quarter-end figures show the difference in scale entering the scheduled launch.

Arc gives Circle a possible route to greater use: make USDC the balance that customers need for both financial applications and the transactions powering them. Payments and institutional settlement could give users reasons to keep funds available in USDC.

But additional activity on Arc and additional USDC demand are different outcomes. Moving an existing USDC balance from another chain to Arc changes where it is used, and paying fees in USDC likewise establishes a use for the token without proving a market-share gain.

The competitive test is whether easier transactions encourage customers to bring additional money into USDC and keep using it. A public network can provide the infrastructure for that change, but the launch alone cannot demonstrate it.

The post Circle opens Arc mainnet as it seeks an edge for USDC utility appeared first on CryptoSlate.

The European Central Bank has opened applications for online merchants to join a controlled pilot of the digital euro, its proposed retail central bank digital currency. The move brings the 2027 test closer to online checkout, but it does not put an issued digital euro into public circulation.

The Sept. 15 merchant call gives EU-established e-commerce and mobile-commerce businesses until 17:00 CET on Oct. 27 to apply. Applicants must serve customers across at least two euro-area countries included in the pilot and operate an active platform flexible enough to integrate the test payment flow.

The beta will not constitute the digital euro defined under the proposed EU Regulation and will not carry legal-tender status. That boundary is central to the exercise: it lets the Eurosystem test payment rails, operating processes and user experience under controlled conditions without making the instrument ordinary public money.

Testing the path from provider to checkout

Merchants selected for the pilot will need to contract and integrate with an acquiring payment service provider. The ECB selected 36 providers in July for acquiring, distributing, or dual roles, creating the network needed to connect test users with participating businesses.

In practical terms, distributing providers will give eligible users access to beta services, while acquiring providers will allow merchants to receive the test payments. This two-sided setup lets the pilot test both access to the beta service and merchant acceptance rather than treating checkout as an isolated interface.

Merchant participation is voluntary and unpaid, so the new call tests whether businesses can fit the proposed payment flow into existing online and mobile commerce operations.

The pilot's 12-month operational phase is expected to begin in the second half of 2027. The detailed schedule places operations from the third quarter of 2027 through the third quarter of 2028, after integration and testing.

Before that operating phase, merchants and providers will prepare their connections inside the controlled pilot timetable. The ECB's pilot FAQ says the operational phase could be extended by up to six months.

The exercise will inform technical work but will not decide whether to issue a digital euro. The European Parliament authorized negotiations on the proposed legal framework in July, and the legislation remained under discussion when the merchant call opened. Even after lawmakers adopt a framework, the ECB would still need to make a separate issuance decision.

The application window moves the project into a more realistic commerce test without crossing its legal or monetary threshold. Merchants can test how a possible future payment method would work at checkout, while the final design, legal basis, and decision to issue remain unsettled.

The post ECB opens merchant applications for controlled 2027 digital euro pilot appeared first on CryptoSlate.

On Tuesday, September 22, 2026 at 3:00 p.m. UTC, Avalanche activates its Helicon network upgrade. For you as an AVAX holder, one thing changes above all: anyone delegating their coins will from that moment have to look more closely at which validator they hand them to. The minimum lock-up in staking falls from two weeks to 48 hours, and at the same time the bar at which a validator still earns rewards at all rises from 80 percent uptime to 90 percent. Together the two shift a slice of the risk onto you.

On September 17, 2026 at 06:57 UTC we queried the validator list directly from the P-Chain and counted how many active operators would fail the new bar. The result follows further down, along with the method. The headline figure first: 37 out of 593.

Helicon on September 22: what changes in Avalanche staking

Helicon is a hard fork, a rule change that every node in the network has to adopt at the same moment. On the Fuji testnet the upgrade has been running since July 28, 2026. For the main network the documentation names September 22, 2026, 3:00 p.m. UTC, which corresponds to 5:00 p.m. Central European Summer Time.

Technically Helicon bundles six so-called Avalanche Community Proposals. An ACP is a numbered proposal to change the protocol, comparable to an EIP on Ethereum. Four of them bear directly on staking, two on transaction execution:

• ACP-273 lowers the minimum duration of a validation.
• ACP-267 raises the required uptime.
• ACP-236 introduces automatic renewal of a validation.
• ACP-285 lowers the minimum consumption rate and with it the reward on a short lock-up.
• ACP-194 decouples the acceptance of a block from its execution.
• ACP-283 makes the minimum gas price on the C-Chain demand-dependent.

For the large majority of AVAX holders who keep their coins on an exchange and do nothing further there, nothing visible happens on September 22. The upgrade becomes relevant the moment you delegate yourself or enter into a new delegation.

From 336 hours to 48: the minimum lock-up for validators falls

Until now a validator on the main network had to commit for at least 336 hours, so for two full weeks. After Helicon, 48 hours are enough. The upper limit stays at one year.

What a validation period actually is

A validation period is the span for which an operator locks its stake into the protocol. Unlike Ethereum, Avalanche has no exit queue and no withdrawal on request: start and end are fixed when the position is opened, the stake is bound until the end, and the reward is paid out only afterwards. How widely such periods differ from network to network is something we measured across five chains in our overview of staking lock-up periods.

The minimum stakes stay unchanged. Anyone validating themselves needs 2,000 AVAX. Anyone delegating, meaning assigning their stake to somebody else's validator, needs 25 AVAX. A validator's total weight remains capped at the smaller of two values: three million AVAX, and five times its own stake.

The shorter lock-up sounds convenient at first, but it has a flip side that touches you directly as a delegator. That is the subject of the section after next.

The uptime bar rises from 80 to 90 percent: who that hits

Uptime describes the share of the validation period during which a node was reachable for the network. Until now a validator had to hold this threshold above 80 percent in order to receive rewards at the end. For all periods beginning on or after September 22 it sits at 90 percent.

Running periods keep the old threshold of 80 percent. So there is no cut-off date on which existing delegations become worthless in bulk. The change takes effect only at the next commitment, and that is precisely why it is easy to miss.

For you as a delegator this is the single most important point of the whole upgrade. You run no node, yet you carry its outcome: if the validator you delegated to misses the threshold, the reward for that cycle lapses. The staked amount itself is untouched and comes back when the period ends. What is missing is the yield.

Our P-Chain measurement: 37 of 593 validators sit below 90 percent

Whether the new bar is a theoretical problem or a practical one can be counted. On September 17, 2026 at 06:57 UTC we called the method platform.getCurrentValidators on the public node api.avax.network/ext/bc/P and evaluated the full response. This analysis was carried out by cryptoticker.io itself on September 17, 2026.

The response covered 593 active validators on the main network. Of those, 37 sat below an uptime of 90 percent, which is 6.2 percent of the field. 24 of them are even below 80 percent and therefore already miss today's threshold. That leaves 13 operators in the new risk band between 80 and 90 percent. Those thirteen still earn rewards today and would no longer do so after September 22 if nothing changes about their availability.

The rest of the field stands solid. The median sits at 99.92 percent, the tenth percentile still at 95.96 percent. The worst value measured was 0.01 percent. 24 nodes were not connected at all at the time of the query.

How the stake is distributed

The 593 validators held 166.16 million AVAX of their own stake between them. On top came 38.70 million AVAX from 32,405 individual delegations. Their concentration is remarkable: only 250 of the 593 validators had even a single delegator. The remaining 343 run without outside money.

On period lengths the measurement confirms the old rule. The shortest validation period found ran exactly 14 days, the longest 365 days, with a median of 90 days. 74 cycles end before the upgrade, a further 236 in the thirty days after it. For those 310 operators the decision about the new rules is therefore imminent.

What this measurement does not show

The uptime value comes from the perspective of the node queried. The protocol assesses availability from the perspective of many nodes, which is why the value at a single endpoint can deviate. Equally impossible to check was which operator intends to move to the new software version in time, and how individual exchanges handle the date. Anyone wanting to reproduce the figures can issue the same call themselves; the endpoint is public and requires no key.

A delegation has to fit inside one validator cycle: the new trap

Delegating used to be a fairly carefree business, because the validator you assigned your coins to was running for at least two weeks anyway. After Helicon its period can end after 48 hours. Your delegation, however, has to sit entirely within a single validator cycle, because beyond the end of that cycle nothing is guaranteed.

In practice this means: before you delegate, you check when the current period of your chosen validator ends. If that is in three days, you cannot enter into a delegation running three months. Skip that look and you get an error message in the best case and a shorter lock-up than planned in the worse one.

On Avalanche you delegate out of your own wallet, and the coins never leave your control in the process. Which wallets support this and what you should watch out for in key management is set out in our software wallet comparison.

Check the delegation fee: 147 validators take the full reward

The delegation fee is the share of your reward that the validator keeps for its work. The protocol prescribes a minimum of two percent, and the range is open at the top. Our count from September 17 shows a very uneven field: 252 of the 593 validators stood at the minimum of two percent, 105 at twenty percent, 49 at five percent, and nine each at three and at ten percent.

What stands out are 147 validators with a delegation fee of 100 percent. With them, nothing would remain of your delegation reward. As a rule this is no booby trap but the customary way an operator signals that it does not want outside delegations. A display error in the wallet or one inattentive click is still enough to end up there. The fee is openly listed in the validator list, and it is the first value you read before every delegation.

Auto-renewal for validators, no extension for delegations

Auto-renewal means a validation rolls automatically into the next cycle instead of ending. ACP-236 introduces this procedure, and it answers the problem the short minimum duration would otherwise create: without automatic renewal an operator would have to re-stake by hand every two days.

The operator can determine what share of the reward from the expired cycle it carries into the next, and can change that setting for future cycles. If it misses the 90 percent in a cycle, the position expires instead of rolling on, and that cycle's reward is then lost.

For delegations this explicitly does not apply: a delegation never extends itself. If you want to continue your delegation, you enter into a new one once it has run out, and the rule from the previous section applies again.

Lower yield on a short lock-up: what ACP-285 turns on the consumption rate

On Avalanche, the consumption rate governs what share of the theoretically possible reward is actually paid out, depending on how long somebody commits. Whoever stays longer gets more. Until now the lower value sat at ten percent; after Helicon it falls to 7.5 percent and rises linearly from there over 90 days.

In effect that means the reward, annualised, comes out around 1.3 percentage points lower than today at the shortest possible lock-up. The maximum value on a one-year commitment stays unchanged. Short durations are therefore not forbidden, they are priced.

As a side effect the developers expect annual AVAX inflation to be roughly 0.5 to one percent lower, and the weighted average lock-up duration to rise by around two months. These are forecasts from the protocol side rather than measured values; whether they materialise will only show after the upgrade.

For your own calculation that simply means: if you optimise for yield, the long lock-up remains the better route. If you optimise for flexibility, that will cost you somewhat more from September 22 than it does today.

AvalancheGo v1.15.0: what node operators need to do before September 22

Anyone running their own node has a hard task with a hard deadline. Version AvalancheGo v1.15.0 has to be installed before activation, otherwise the node follows the old rules and drops out of consensus. A node that drops off the network at the wrong moment loses uptime, and uptime has become more expensive from September 22.

Anyone building on Avalanche should additionally go through three things in their code. Removed debug methods have to be replaced. Calls to eth_accounts, eth_coinbase and eth_etherbase are dropped. And because of ACP-194, the state returned by a query using latest can lag behind block acceptance, depending on how long the execution queue currently is.

Dynamic minimum gas price on the C-Chain: what changes when you send

ACP-283 makes the minimum gas price on the C-Chain demand-dependent instead of fixing it. The C-Chain is Avalanche's Ethereum-compatible chain, on which most ordinary transactions and applications run.

In everyday use you notice little of this as long as your wallet works out the fee itself. It becomes relevant for applications and scripts that have a fixed gas price hard-coded. After the upgrade, such calls can produce transactions that get stuck or are rejected. If a transfer of yours hangs on September 22, the fee setting is the first place you look.

Staking through an exchange: why the protocol date does not automatically apply there

A large part of AVAX holdings sits not in a personal wallet but with a provider that handles the staking in the background. In that case your contract applies to you before the protocol does. The provider decides whether it passes on the shorter minimum duration, which deadline it quotes you and what share of the reward it keeps.

Experience shows those shares are considerably higher than the two percent the protocol knows as its floor. It is worth holding your provider's terms up against the protocol values before you enter into a new commitment. A look into the terms and conditions under the heading of payout periods usually answers both questions at once.

Staking income in Germany: the 256 euro exemption limit

In Germany, staking rewards count as other income under section 22 number 3 of the Income Tax Act. What matters is the market value at the moment of receipt, meaning when the reward reaches you. An exemption limit of 256 euros a year applies, and exemption limit means: if it is exceeded, the entire amount becomes taxable, and not merely the part above it.

Two points are often confused here. The holding period of your staked coins is not extended to ten years by staking; the Federal Ministry of Finance confirmed this in its circular of March 6, 2025 on individual questions of the income tax treatment of crypto assets. For the rewards themselves, a separate one-year period under section 23 of the Income Tax Act begins on receipt.

Because a delegation can be settled considerably more often after Helicon than before, correspondingly more individual receipt dates arise. Anyone who had four settlements a year until now quickly reaches a multiple of that. Note the date, quantity and price of every reward while the data is still within reach.

Avalanche staking after Helicon: what to take away

1. Check which validator you delegate to before September 22. Look at the uptime of the current period and hold it against the new threshold of 90 percent, and read the delegation fee before you confirm. 37 of the 593 active validators were below it in our measurement, and 147 took the full reward. If you would rather not delegate yourself, our comparison of staking providers puts the platforms' terms side by side.
2. Settle where your keys are before you enter into a new commitment. Delegating works out of your own wallet, and your stake stays under your control while it does. How to store the keys for that safely is shown in our hardware wallet comparison.
3. Record every reward with its date and price. The shorter cycles generate more receipt dates, and each one counts towards the 256 euro exemption limit. A portfolio tracker takes that off your hands; providers and prices are listed in our overview of crypto tax tools.

The details of the upgrade come from the Avalanche staking documentation and from the technical overview of the Helicon upgrade, the validator figures from our own P-Chain query of September 17, 2026.

(As of September 17, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

The European Central Bank has opened its digital euro pilot project to applications, and two dates in October 2026 are now fixed. Merchants selling online can express their interest in taking part until October 27, 2026. Before that, on Tuesday, October 6, 2026 at 3:00 p.m. CET, an online information session on the pilot takes place. The ECB has deliberately opened this session to anyone interested, consumers included.

Both dates appear on the English-language version of the ECB pilot page. The German version of the same page does not list them at the time of writing, and carries a note at the top directing readers to the English version for current information. Anyone informing themselves in German walks straight past both dates.

One point for context: the pilot is a test, and it is not a launch. The ECB is examining a beta version, and by its own account it will decide whether to issue a digital euro at all only once the digital euro regulation has been adopted.

What the ECB is testing in the digital euro pilot project

The digital euro is central bank digital money, known in English as a central bank digital currency, or CBDC. The definition in one sentence: electronic money issued by the central bank itself, as opposed to the balance in your current account, which is a claim on your commercial bank.

In the pilot, the ECB says it wants to examine a beta version of the digital euro under real conditions. The underlying infrastructure is to be tested in everyday situations, such as payments in shops or between private individuals. The central bank names its three test questions itself: is the system robust, is it user-friendly, is it scalable. The results are meant to feed into the further preparations.

The pilot is due to begin in the second half of 2027 and to run for twelve months. The application window in October 2026 therefore sits roughly a year ahead of the actual start. The gap is the usual lead time: payment service providers and merchants have to connect their systems before anyone pays with it.

One term that comes up often here is the digital euro rulebook. It sets out the technical and contractual rules under which banks, payment service providers and merchants would process the digital euro. In July 2026 the ECB published a new draft of this rulebook, version 0.91, which took up feedback from a large market consultation. A version number below 1.0 is an honest signal: the rulebook is a draft.

Digital euro, Bitcoin and stablecoins: why the pilot matters to crypto investors

For readers who hold crypto assets, the digital euro is no competing investment product. The ECB intends it as a means of payment; it is not designed as a store of value, and that is precisely why it touches the crypto side at all. It targets the same use case as euro stablecoins, namely digital payment in a stable unit of account.

Three things can be kept cleanly apart. Bitcoin is a scarce, volatile asset with no issuer that you can hold yourself. A euro stablecoin is a privately issued token pegged to the euro that falls under the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation inside the EU. The digital euro would be central bank money, a claim on the Eurosystem. We have set out the differences between the digital euro and stablecoins in detail elsewhere.

In practice this means that if the digital euro arrives, you get a state-issued alternative for payments that today run over cards, payment service providers or stablecoins. The ECB is open about its reasoning, pointing to Europe's dependence on international card schemes and citing a concrete figure: 13 of the 20 euro area countries rely on international card schemes for card payments. Anyone buying crypto assets through an exchange and moving euros in and out notices little of that dependence day to day, but still pays for it through the payment rails. Which trading venues in Europe operate under supervision is set out in our comparison of regulated crypto exchanges.

Two digital euro dates in October 2026: information session and application deadline

The two dates differ in what they ask of you.

October 6, 2026, 3:00 p.m. CET, online information session. The ECB calls it a focus session. According to its announcement, it covers the aims of the pilot, the timetable and the selection procedure for merchants. The decisive sentence on the page: the session is open to everyone who wants to learn more about the pilot, and the ECB explicitly lists merchants, payment service providers, technical service providers and consumers. Registration via the ECB page is required to attend.

October 27, 2026, close of the merchant call for expressions of interest. It is aimed at merchants in e-commerce and mobile commerce. Those merchants are to help design and test the digital euro payment flows for online and mobile platforms. This is a call for expressions of interest, not a binding sign-up for the pilot itself: the ECB makes the selection afterwards.

Who takes part in the digital euro pilot: 36 payment service providers, merchants and central bank staff

The participant side is already partly filled. Following the call for expressions of interest aimed at payment service providers in March 2026, more than 50 providers applied, according to the ECB. Of those, 36 payment service providers authorised in the euro area were selected. The central bank justifies its choice with broad coverage by business model, size and geographical spread.

Added to them are selected merchants, now being sought, along with staff of the ECB and of the 19 national central banks. This group is to try out the beta version in everyday use, in the ECB's own examples when paying in the staff canteen. The figure 19 is no typo and no contradiction of the 20 euro area countries: in this list the ECB counts itself separately from the national central banks.

What is missing from the list is the general public. Going by the ECB's description, there is no general sign-up for private individuals wanting to join the pilot.

Can you take part in the digital euro pilot as a consumer?

The honest answer has two parts. You can attend the information session on October 6, because the ECB names consumers explicitly as a target group. You cannot apply for the pilot itself as the announcement currently stands: the participant groups are payment service providers, selected merchants and central bank staff.

This distinction is easily lost in the coverage, because the whole process runs as a merchant story. For you it means that the October date is a chance to hear first hand how the central bank presents its timetable and its selection, and to put questions where they can be answered. It amounts to no more than that, and anyone expecting an early issuance of digital euro to private individuals will be disappointed.

Why the German version of the ECB page leaves out the two dates

A detail that matters more in practice than it sounds for German-speaking readers: the ECB maintains its pilot page in every official language, but keeps only the English version up to date. The German page carries a note at the top saying that current information is to be taken from the English language version.

The result is that the German version does carry the timeframe of the pilot and the description of the beta version, while its news section still shows the March 2026 call to payment service providers. The call to merchants and the focus session on October 6 are absent there. The description of the participants is also less precise: the German version speaks generally of selected payment service providers, while the English one names the figure 36.

So anyone wanting to check the state of the project reads the English page. That is more than a technicality: it explains why these two dates have barely surfaced in German-speaking countries so far.

The digital euro timetable to 2029: regulation, pilot and possible first issuance

The ECB names three milestones, and each one comes with a caveat.

• 2026: adoption of the digital euro regulation. The ECB frames its entire timetable as an assumption rather than a fact: the central bank assumes the regulation will be adopted in 2026.
• Second half of 2027: start of the twelve-month pilot project.
• 2029: possible first issuance of the digital euro. The central bank wants to be ready for it, but will decide whether it actually issues only once the regulation has been adopted.

The legislative process runs in parallel and lies with the European legislators rather than with the ECB. Where the procedure stands and which points remain contested, above all the question of a cap on your balance, we have set out in our piece on the digital euro holding limit. That cap is the point at which the project becomes concrete for your current account.

What the beta version of the digital euro is and what it is not

A beta version is a working pre-release tested under real conditions before any go-live. In the pilot that means real behaviour in real situations feeds in, while the scope stays limited to the group of participants.

From that follows what the pilot explicitly is not. It is no launch of the digital euro, no preliminary stage conferring a legal entitlement and no decision on issuance. The ECB states in its own account that the preparatory work remains flexible so that it can be aligned with the legislative process. As long as the regulation has not been adopted, the legal framework is not settled either, including any obligations for merchants.

For your financial planning that means, soberly: nothing changes for your account this year or next. What can change is the framework in which payment service providers and merchants build their systems, and that will later shape the routes over which you move money.

What merchants with an online shop should weigh up now

If you run an online business yourself, the expression of interest by October 27 is a genuine decision. Three points speak for it, all of them named by the ECB: you can help shape the payment flows, you see the technical requirements earlier than your competitors, and you test against an infrastructure that, if it succeeds, works the same way in every euro area country.

Against that stands the effort. A beta integration ties up development time in a project whose legal basis has yet to be agreed, and the pilot only starts in the second half of 2027. Anyone with scarce development resources is pushing back work on things that bring in revenue tomorrow.

A sober middle course: the information session on October 6 costs an hour and supplies the basis for the decision that falls due three weeks later. Anyone accepting crypto assets in their own shop knows the trade-off from practice anyway, because the same questions of settlement, chargebacks and costs have to be answered there.

Digital euro and self-custody: what changes for your wallet

The short answer: the digital euro changes nothing about your self-custody. Going by the ECB's description it will sit in an account with your bank or with a public intermediary, so with an intermediary in either case. A wallet whose keys only you hold therefore remains the only way to move digital assets without anyone else's consent.

Two points are still worth keeping an eye on. First the offline function: the ECB holds out the prospect of payments without a network connection, which comes closer to cash than any card payment does. Second the planned cap on your balance, which has no equivalent for self-custodied crypto assets and which marks the digital euro clearly as a means of payment rather than a form of saving.

Anyone holding crypto assets today takes a separate decision about how to secure the keys. The choice between custody with a provider and your own hardware is a topic in itself, and our hardware wallet comparison shows what matters in practice for self-custody.

How to tell whether the digital euro timetable holds

Timetables in this project have slipped before, so it is worth looking at the points where slippage shows up early. Three observation points are enough.

1. The regulation. The legal act is the condition the ECB places ahead of its entire timetable. If the legislative process runs beyond 2026, everything behind it moves back.
2. The rulebook. As long as the draft stays below version 1.0, the technical and contractual rules are not final. A jump to a first full version would be the signal that the pilot is getting concrete.
3. The selection of merchants. After October 27 the ECB has to choose from the expressions of interest. A participant field that drags on is an early hint of a later start.

None of these points works as a signal for crypto price moves. The digital euro is a payments project with a horizon out to 2029, and anyone deriving a price call for the coming weeks from it is overstretching the evidence.

Digital euro and the ECB pilot project: what to take away

1. Put October 6, 2026, 3:00 p.m. CET, in your diary if you want the state of play first hand. Registration runs via the ECB pilot page, and the session is open to consumers as well. If you also want to know how European supervision applies to trading venues, you will find that context in our comparison of regulated crypto exchanges.
2. Check the expression of interest by October 27, 2026 if you work in online retail. It is a non-binding expression, with the ECB making the selection afterwards. For the payments side of your shop it is also worth looking at settlement via crypto credit cards, which raise the same questions of cost and chargebacks.
3. Change nothing about your custody because of the pilot project. Until a possible issuance in 2029 the digital euro remains a plan under reservation. If you wanted to review how your keys are secured anyway, our hardware wallet comparison will help you choose.

The two primary sources to read up on: the English ECB page on the pilot project carrying both dates, and the German version of the same page, which describes the framework but leaves the dates out.

(As of September 17, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Robinhood Chain went live on 1 July 2026, and the mainnet launch came with a 90-day gas rebate for transactions sent from the Robinhood Wallet (Arbitrum documented the launch itself). That window closes at the end of September; crypto.news puts the date at 29 September. After it, every transaction on the chain pays a network fee in ETH again. For the memecoins that set the tone on this chain, it is the first real stress test.

How big the chain has become

The numbers have grown sharply. On 17 September, value locked stands at around $929 million, DEX volume at roughly $1.54 billion over 24 hours and $39.1 billion over 30 days, with about $67.4 billion cumulative since launch (DefiLlama, retrieved 17 September). On 13 September it was $1.88 billion in a single day, which Bloomingbit counts as more than half of Uniswap's entire volume.

In fees, the chain took in around $7.8 million over 24 hours and $303.6 million over 30 days (DefiLlama). On 2 September, $4.01 million of chain revenue stood against $81,714 at Solana the same day (crypto.news, 4 September). Anyone reading that as Robinhood Chain overtaking Solana is comparing a subsidised launch phase with a settled network. That is precisely what this deadline is about.

Why the gas is the thing that decides it

Most of the fee-generating activity does not run through the tokenised equities Robinhood built the chain for. It runs through the memecoin launchpad Pons and through trading bots (crypto.news). Pons collected around $35.0 million in fees over seven days, $128.8 million over 30 days and roughly $151.3 million all time (DefiLlama, retrieved 17 September). Around 25,000 new tokens were created through it on 2 September alone, against an average of roughly 10,000 a day (Bloomingbit, 14 September).

An operation at that scale depends on a very low cost per attempt. Launching twenty tokens to hit one works out differently once every launch and every swap costs gas again. On top of that, the trading barely comes from the Robinhood app itself: Bloomingbit estimates its share of chain trading at one to two percent. The subsidy has therefore mostly pulled in outside usage, and that usage has no reason to stay other than the numbers.

What happens afterwards is open. There is no reliable forecast for how much activity survives, and any figure someone quotes you for it is a guess.

What it means for investors

The point that matters in practice is not a price question but a liquidity question. Memecoins on a young chain depend on thin pools. If transaction counts fall, those pools get thinner, and the gap between the quoted price and the price you actually exit at widens. That barely touches small positions and hits larger ones immediately.

How fast it moves in both directions is visible in CASHCAT, the chain's best-known token: on 3 September it set a new all-time high at around $0.3143, and on 17 September it trades near $0.1912. That is a gain of some 82 percent over 30 days and a drawdown of roughly 39 percent from the high (CoinGecko, retrieved 17 September). Both numbers describe the same token two weeks apart.

This is also where the difference between watching and trading becomes obvious: Dexscreener and TradingView give you charts, not execution. One mobile alternative is the trading app FOMO Family, which lets you discover, swipe through and trade meme and low-cap tokens directly in the app, with a fast deposit flow. Download the app through the link and you get ten percent off trading fees. There is also community speculation about a possible airdrop for active users - that is unconfirmed, the provider has promised nothing, and it is not a reason to deposit money. None of this changes the risk: meme and low-cap trading stays highly volatile, and losing the entire position is possible at any time.

What to measure in the days after 29 September

1. Daily transactions. The interesting number is not the price but how many swaps are left once they cost something again.
2. New tokens on Pons. If the count falls well below ten thousand a day, the supply this segment feeds on disappears.
3. Pool liquidity rather than market capitalisation. Check how much actually sits in the pool and whether it is locked. At a valuation in the hundreds of millions with a few million in the pool, exiting at the quoted price is effectively impossible.
4. Value locked. It sits just short of a billion dollars. Whether it stays there after the deadline is the single most honest answer to the question of whether the chain carries without a subsidy.

The background to all of this - what Robinhood Chain technically is, how the memecoin wave came about and how investors get access - is set out in full in our Robinhood Chain guide. If you are interested in how individual meme tokens are valued over a longer horizon, see our prediction pages for Pump.fun, the launchpad token Pons will most likely be measured against, and for BONK from the Solana ecosystem.

And the distinction that still holds after 29 September: memecoins are a zero-sum game in which earlier buyers' gains come out of later buyers' losses. That is not a moral judgement but arithmetic. Decide in advance what amount you could write off entirely without it changing your plans.

Disclosure: some of the providers named in this article work with us through partner programmes. This has no influence on our editorial assessment.

(As of 17 September 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy. Memecoins can lose their entire value; invest only amounts whose total loss you can absorb.)

On Friday, September 18, 2026, at around 05:01 UTC, the Solana network tightens its own beat: a slot will then last 250 milliseconds instead of 300. The switch for it is already set and takes effect automatically at the boundary into epoch 1037. For you as a holder of Solana, that mainly means three things: delegations and unstaking take effect faster, staking rewards arrive more often and in smaller portions, and the window in which a signed transaction stays valid shrinks to roughly 38 seconds. If your SOL simply sits on an exchange, you need do nothing. If you sign offline, delegate, or run a validator yourself, read this to the end.

The change is no surprise but the third step of a roadmap that began in August. The only thing new is that the 250 millisecond step now has a concrete date. Solana's official overview page still listed this step without a mainnet date when we checked on September 17, while the development team Anza had already flagged the activation as imminent on September 16. That gap between announcement and documentation is why the figure has barely surfaced so far.

What is actually being changed at Solana on September 18

A single number in the protocol is being changed: the target time for a slot. That value drops from 300 to 250 milliseconds. The number looks small, but almost everything in the network that looks like time hangs off it. Epoch length follows it, the validity period of a blockhash follows it, and the ceilings for compute per block follow it too.

The improvement proposal responsible is SIMD-0525. It describes a staircase from 400 through 350, 300 and 250 milliseconds to a target of 200 milliseconds. Two steps have already been taken on mainnet: the move from 400 to 350 milliseconds on August 19, 2026, at the start of epoch 1019, and the move from 350 to 300 milliseconds on August 25, 2026, at the start of epoch 1023. The third step is the one at issue here. A fourth is still to come after it.

What explicitly does not happen: there is no token swap, no migration, no deadline by which you would have to pull something out of a contract, and no confirmation you would have to grant in your wallet. Anyone asking you to approve a Solana upgrade wants something from you other than your consent to a protocol parameter.

Slot, epoch and feature gate: the three terms behind the date

The slot is the time window for one block

A slot is the time window in which exactly one validator may produce a block. Once it expires, the next one is up, whether the previous one delivered or not. Slot time is therefore not a speed limit for transactions but the clock rate at which the network puts out its blocks.

The epoch is the accounting period

An epoch is Solana's accounting period and covers a fixed 432,000 slots. At its boundary the network does the bookkeeping: delegations take effect, rewards are settled, prepared protocol switches are armed. Because the number of slots is fixed while the duration of a slot falls, the epoch gets shorter. At 400 milliseconds it worked out at 48 hours, at 300 milliseconds it is 36 hours, at 250 milliseconds it is 30 hours. At the final target of 200 milliseconds it lands at 24 hours.

This is the point at which the figures in circulation deserve a look: several reports give an epoch length of 24 hours for Friday's change. That is the value for 200 milliseconds, meaning the step after this one. For 250 milliseconds the same calculation gives 30 hours, and the official formula based on 432,000 slots arrives at that value too.

The feature gate is the switch with a delay

A feature gate is a switch in the validator code that keeps an already shipped function dormant until enough stake weight is behind it. When it flips, it never does so mid-epoch but at an epoch boundary. For this change the chain ran across three epochs: in epoch 1035 the switch stood at pending, in epoch 1036 it became active at protocol level, and with the start of epoch 1037 the new timing rules apply.

Why the switch flips at epoch boundary 1037 and not at midnight

Solana has no clock. The network counts slots, and a time of day can only be estimated from slots. That is precisely why every serious announcement puts an "around" in front of the time: the boundary into epoch 1037 falls on a particular slot, and when that slot is reached depends on how fast the network actually runs in the hours beforehand.

That imprecision is why two sources can say 05:01 UTC and a third 05:06 UTC without any of them being wrong. If you want something done by the exact moment, plan with an hour of buffer. If you only want to know whether you are affected, the calendar day will do: Friday, early morning European time.

Our own measurement: 317 milliseconds per slot the day before the change

cryptoticker.io collected this analysis itself on September 17, 2026. Method: ten consecutive performance samples of 60 seconds each via Solana's public mainnet node, retrieved shortly after 00:50 UTC, plus a query of the current epoch status. That covered 1,893 slots across ten minutes of network operation.

The result: on average 317.0 milliseconds elapsed per slot, with individual samples between 312.5 and 326.1 milliseconds. The value therefore sits above the current target of 300 milliseconds. That is normal and no sign of a problem. What is measured is elapsed clock time divided by the number of slots actually filled, and every slot a validator does not serve stretches that average.

The date could be recalculated from the same query. The network stood in epoch 1036 at slot 111,540 of 432,000, leaving 320,460 slots to go. At the measured 317 milliseconds that gives 28.2 hours of remaining runtime, and therefore September 18 at around 05:06 UTC. Our own calculation confirms the announced time of 05:01 UTC to within a few minutes. The node queried reported client version 4.3.0-rc.0.

What we could not check: how large the share of validators already running the recommended version is, and whether the switch actually takes effect on Friday. Both only show up after the fact. The compute ceilings mentioned further down also rest on a specialist report rather than on the official overview page.

Solana staking: what shorter epochs mean for delegation, unstaking and rewards

For anyone who has delegated SOL, epoch length is the practically most important quantity in this whole change. Delegations and their withdrawal take effect at epoch boundaries, not immediately. If the epoch shortens from 36 to 30 hours, the typical wait until a new delegation earns rewards, or until deactivated SOL is freely available again, shortens with it. How that process works in detail, and why a waiting period is not a penalty, we took apart in our article on lock-up periods and unstaking duration.

With rewards, the rhythm changes, not the amount. Payouts happen per epoch. More epochs in a year therefore mean more credits, but smaller ones. The annual yield on your delegation does not rise as a result. Anyone logging earnings by epoch gets more rows in the same spreadsheet from Friday, and anyone comparing providers by payout frequency will find the differences between the platforms in our overview of staking providers.

One common misunderstanding should be cleared up here: Friday's date has nothing to do with Alpenglow. That is a different and considerably larger overhaul of the consensus mechanism with a roadmap of its own, which we described in our article on the Alpenglow activation at the end of September. Two switches, two dates, two different sets of consequences.

Blockhash expiry at 250 milliseconds: why you have to be quicker when signing

The blockhash is the timestamp of a Solana transaction: a reference to a recently produced block that prevents the same instruction from being submitted again later. The lifetime of that stamp is measured not in seconds but in blocks. According to Solana's documentation, 151 blockhashes are valid. The documentation still converts that using the old target time of 400 milliseconds and thus arrives at roughly 60 to 90 seconds.

That span falls with the beat. At the 317 milliseconds measured today, roughly 48 seconds remain; at 250 milliseconds, roughly 38. A specialist report on the upcoming change puts the window at 37.5 seconds, which is the same calculation using 150 blocks instead of 151. The order of magnitude is the same either way: a good half minute.

This matters wherever a human being or a device stands between creating and sending a transaction. Signing with a hardware wallet burns those seconds on unlocking, paging through the display and confirming. So does preparing a transaction, then checking the address once more at leisure, and only sending afterwards. The consequence is not a lost payment but a rejected one: the network discards a transaction with an expired blockhash, and the wallet reports an error. How to tell whether such an attempt really failed or went through after all is covered in our guide to failed Solana transactions.

In practice that means: unlock the device before sending, check the address beforehand rather than inside the running window, and do not treat the confirmation dialogue as reading time. Which devices have short confirmation paths and which send you through several menus is shown in our hardware wallet comparison.

Compute limits per block fall too: what that means for swaps at peak times

Shorter blocks mean less compute time per block. So that throughput per second stays constant, the ceilings fall in the same proportion as the slot time. A specialist report on the change puts the block limit after the switch at 37.5 million compute units instead of the previous 45 million, and the ceiling for a single writable account at 15 million instead of 18 million. Those values were not on the official overview page on September 17, which is why we explicitly mark them as that report's figures.

For you as a user, the number matters less than its consequence. When a single account in heavy demand gets fewer compute units per block, transactions compete more tightly for the same pool. In quiet phases you will notice nothing. At peak times, say at the launch of a new token, the priority fee more often decides whether your swap makes it into the next block or waits. Anyone who has permanently set their fee ceiling in the wallet to the lowest possible value should know that setting before noticing it for the first time during a rush.

Validator operators: Agave 4.3 by Friday evening

Anyone running a validator has the only real deadline in this whole business. The recommended version is Agave v4.3.0-rc.1, released on September 11, 2026. Anza has asked operators to install the update by the end of Friday, meaning by the close of the same day on which the switch takes effect.

That is not an alarm but routine. Running an older version does not immediately cut you off, but it risks missing blocks once the timing rules change. For delegators that creates a quiet task: if your validator skips a conspicuous number of slots in the days after the change, the likely reason is a version that has not been installed, and your rewards fall with it.

If you only hold SOL on an exchange: why you need do nothing

For the great majority of investors the honest answer is: nothing. If your SOL sits with an exchange or a broker, their operator takes care of client versions, blockhashes and epoch boundaries. You do not have to confirm an update, change an address or meet a deadline.

Two edge cases remain. First, around a change like this a provider may pause deposits and withdrawals on the Solana network for a few hours. That is a precaution taken by the individual house and will then appear in its status notice. Second, a date like this is a well-known occasion for attempted fraud. Neither Anza nor an exchange will message you asking to enable an upgrade in your wallet.

What the official documentation does not yet say

The roadmap on Solana's site still listed the move from 300 to 250 milliseconds on September 17 as active on devnet and testnet, with a mainnet date still to be determined. The two steps already taken, by contrast, are recorded there with date and epoch. Anza's announcement of September 16 is therefore more current than the documentation page describing it.

A simple rule follows for you: go by the epoch number, not by a date in an article. The number 1037 is verifiable, and any wallet with network details, as well as any public block explorer, will show you which epoch the network is currently in. If it says 1037 or higher, the switch has flipped.

Solana slot time: what to take away

1. Check by Friday morning where your SOL sits and who is responsible for it. On an exchange you are in the clear. If you delegate yourself, note that from Friday your next change to the delegation takes roughly 30 hours instead of 36 to become effective, and that your rewards arrive more often. Which platform settles how is set out in our overview of staking providers.
2. Set your signing routine to a good 38 seconds. Check address and amount before you create the transaction, and only then reach for the device. If you notice in the process that your hardware wallet sends you through too many menus, it is worth a look at the hardware wallet comparison.
3. Check your rewards in the week after the change. More frequent, smaller credits are to be expected; earnings that stay away permanently or drop conspicuously are not. Such a drop points to a validator not running the new version. A switch is possible at any epoch boundary, and you will find suitable places to go in the provider overview.

Sources to read up on: the official page on reduced slot times with the staged plan, and the developer documentation on transaction confirmation with the figure of 151 valid blockhashes.

(As of September 17, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Balancer is being wound down, and two dates matter for you. The first is October 30, 2026: on that day every pool that can technically be halted is switched to "withdrawals only". The second is the end of May 2027, when the window opens for BAL holders to burn their tokens and receive a share of the organisation's assets in return. If you have money sitting in a Balancer pool, the first date is yours. If you hold BAL, both are.

The proposal has been in Balancer's governance forum since September 14, 2026, under the title "Orderly Winddown of Balancer and Distribution of the Treasury". Nothing is settled yet: token holders vote on it from September 25 to September 29. One sentence in the paper can cost holders real money, and it has had little attention so far. This article works through the proposal, from the vote to the final distribution day in July 2028.

Balancer winddown: the four dates that matter to you

Balancer is an automated market maker, a trading venue where pots of two or more crypto assets set the prices and no order book sits in between. Those pots are called pools, and anyone who puts money in is a liquidity provider. The whole thing is run by a DAO, an organisation in which token holders vote instead of a board. That DAO is now proposing to shut itself down.

The proposal's timeline spans almost two years. Four points from it you need to know:

• September 25 to 29, 2026: the vote on the proposal runs and decides everything that follows.
• October 30, 2026: pausable pools go to "withdrawals only". The bug bounty programme, under which security researchers have reported and been paid for vulnerabilities, ends the same day.
• End of May 2027: round one opens. BAL holders burn their tokens and receive their pro rata share of the assets. The window runs for six months, until the end of November 2027.
• End of January 2028: round two goes out as an airdrop to exactly those addresses that redeemed in round one. A final top-up follows at the end of July 2028.

The sentence with the largest financial effect sits in the section on BAL holders, and it amounts to this: anyone who does not redeem in round one has no share in round two. There is no latecomer rule. Let the window between the end of May and the end of November 2027 pass, and you are out of the distribution.

What "withdrawals only" means in practice on October 30, 2026

"Withdrawals only" means you can still take your balance out of a pool, but you can no longer put new money in, and swaps no longer route through that pool. The proposal describes this for pools whose contracts have a pause function. Where the contracts do not allow it, so-called recovery mode is activated, an emergency mode that keeps withdrawals open using the simplest possible method.

Pools that cannot be halted at all keep running unchanged. For those, the protocol fee is to be set to zero as far as the contracts permit. The project intends to publish how each individual pool is treated before the cut-off date. Non-pausable legacy contracts in the Balancer universe are not a theoretical concern: one of them was behind the rounding bug in the Balancer V1 legacy pools, through which roughly $234,000 drained away at the end of August 2026.

From November 1, 2026, the infrastructure is shut down. What remains, according to the proposal, is a simplified withdrawal interface, the necessary data supply and public documentation. The front end, the routing and the support you know today count as discontinued from October 30.

Non-custodial: why your pool balance does not simply disappear

Non-custodial means your crypto assets are not held by any company. Program code on the blockchain holds them, and only your key can move them. The proposal spells this out: withdrawing does not depend on Balancer, or anyone else, continuing to operate. That is the single most reassuring sentence in the whole paper, and it is also why panic is out of place here.

October 30 is therefore not a day on which money disappears. It is the day from which the convenient routes fall away. As long as the contracts stand, you can reach your balance, if necessary directly through the contract functions or through third-party interfaces that support Balancer pools. The documentation for that is due to appear while the exit window is still open. Convenient it is not, and it demands care with every transaction.

Two things do fall away, and you should factor them in. First, the interface through which you exit in two clicks today will be gone. Second, the bug bounty coverage ends on the same day, the programme that paid security researchers for reporting holes instead of exploiting them. Both argue for getting the exit done early rather than leaving it to the final week.

The vote from September 25 to 29: who votes, and what is the quorum

Voting runs through Snapshot, a method in which voting power is read off a balance at a fixed block without any blockchain transaction being needed. It costs no fees and is the standard route in decentralised finance. Balancer's voting page shows that proposals there have been running to the same rhythm for weeks, each from Friday evening to Tuesday evening.

Eligible to vote, according to the proposal, is raw BAL on every chain on which the token was issued, plus, on Ethereum, the BAL behind the 80/20 BAL/WETH pool token or locked in veBAL, each at face value. The quorum, meaning the minimum participation that makes a vote valid, stands at five million BAL. That threshold was halved from ten million to five million in August 2026; every vote since August 21 carries the new quorum in the Snapshot data.

What a no vote would mean

The proposer describes the case himself: a no would leave the existing framework standing, meaning the current mandate with its budget, the planned BAL buyback and the bounty programme. The staff terminations run out on October 31 regardless, because they were issued in August. In parallel, contributors are working on a proposal of their own to continue the infrastructure under a new name. A second proposal in the forum has been arguing since September 15 for putting part of the stablecoin holdings to work rather than distributing everything. That proposal, too, is so far only a proposal.

Liquidity providers: how to prepare your exit from a Balancer pool

If you have liquidity in a Balancer pool, your wallet holds a pool token, BPT in Balancer's jargon. That token is your share certificate in the pot, and it is what you hand back when you exit. The first step is therefore always to take stock: open your wallet and check whether positions are sitting there that you have not touched in months.

1. Check what you hold. Which pool tokens sit in which address, and on which chain? Balancer was active on several networks, and a position may sit on a chain you rarely use.
2. Test the exit route. Withdraw a small partial amount before the cut-off date, so you know the route works and what it costs in network fees.
3. Proportional or single-sided exit? A proportional exit returns all components of the pool to you pro rata and avoids price pressure. A single-sided exit into one token alone shifts the pool's balance and costs you noticeably more in thin pools.
4. Decide where the tokens go. Where do the tokens land after the exit? Anyone moving them to their own address needs custody they can handle; our hardware wallet comparison gives an overview of the devices.

A practical note on fees: small positions can founder on network costs. That applies to any exit from a contract position and has nothing to do with this winddown. If your share is worth double digits in euros and the transaction sits on an expensive chain, work out beforehand whether the withdrawal is worth doing at all.

BAL holders: burning for a treasury share, how round one works

The treasury is the organisation's asset pot. It holds a mix of several different crypto assets, and that is exactly how it is to be distributed: in kind, meaning in the tokens actually held, and pro rata, meaning by share of the circulating supply. Redeeming takes BAL irreversibly out of circulation and gives you that share in return. What you receive is explicitly not BAL.

The basis of measurement, according to the proposal, is taken at the block at which round one opens. That block is to be announced at least two weeks in advance and audited. The proposal puts the size at a minimum of nine million dollars at current prices, for the portion managed by treasury manager kpk. Further holdings at other addresses are, according to the paper, still being inventoried and are to be published in full before round one.

Three qualifications belong with that. BAL itself does not count as distributable assets. Funds recovered from the attacks on the protocol in November 2025 belong to the affected liquidity providers and stay outside this distribution. And the figure will move until May 2027 with prices, running costs and whatever still comes in.

veBAL, auraBAL, sdBAL and tetuBAL: four layers with four calendars

veBAL is locked BAL: holders who put their tokens away for a fixed period received more voting power and a larger share of the earnings in return. The proposal notes that every lock in existence today will have expired by the end of May 2027. veBAL does not unlock directly into BAL but into the 80/20 BAL/WETH pool token; that pool is to remain exitable, so you can get from there to BAL.

The wrappers built by other protocols make things messier. auraBAL and sdBAL run to the calendars of their own projects. Anyone not back in BAL by the end of round one does not redeem. tetuBAL is a special case: that lock cannot be undone and will never become BAL again. A separate rule applies to it, under which holders receive half of the amount measured at the proposal's block as BAL from the treasury when round one opens, and can then redeem like everyone else. Anyone who extends a lock after September 14 only redeems if it still expires within the window.

Price against treasury: our calculation from September 17, 2026

We pulled the market data for BAL on September 17, 2026, at 00:38 UTC. The token stood at $0.11035, which is 0.096224 euros. Market capitalisation, meaning price times circulating supply, came to roughly $7.70 million on about 69.79 million circulating tokens. For comparison: BAL hit its all-time high in May 2021 at $74.45.

That yields a calculation worth knowing before somebody else sells it to you with an exclamation mark. Nine million dollars spread across 69.79 million tokens works out at roughly $0.129 per BAL. That is around 17 percent above the price at which the token trades today. In other words, the market values the entire circulating supply below the sum the proposal names as the floor of the treasury.

The calculation is an approximation, and it can be wrong in either direction. The proposal defines the denominator more narrowly than a market data site does: the BAL held by the treasury itself is deducted, as are two holdings dating from the project's early days. A smaller denominator raises the share per token. Several points at once, though, argue against the calculation.

• The vote has not happened yet. Nothing is decided until September 29, and the proposer himself describes what a no would mean.
• More than eight months lie between today and round one. Costs run during that time, and the prices of the tokens held in the treasury move.
• Payment is in kind. You receive a basket of tokens, not a euro amount, and you have to realise that basket yourself.
• The inventory of holdings is still running. The proposal names nine million as the floor for the managed portion and holds out the complete list only for later.
• Trading in BAL is thin. In the daily window of our measurement, roughly 303,000 euros changed hands across all recorded venues.

None of this is a buy recommendation or a price target. It puts a figure from the proposal into context. Anyone turning it into a bet is betting on the outcome of a vote, on an asset statement that is not yet complete, and on a date in the year after next.

What the proposal's cost accounting shows

The proposal puts its numbers on the table, and they explain the timing. It puts total monthly costs at roughly $150,000 and protocol revenue in August at roughly $30,000, after roughly $97,000 in June. The bulk of that revenue still comes from the second protocol version, not from the new third one. For the winddown itself, roughly $150,000 is earmarked from November 1, 2026, until May 2027, then $30,000, plus a reserve of $220,000 that is only drawn on if needed.

Tax in Germany: what redeeming can mean for you

Section 23 of the German Income Tax Act applies to privately held crypto assets in Germany. A sale is taxable if no more than a year lies between acquisition and disposal; after that, the gain is tax free under the law as it stands. What matters for you is that the tax authorities treat the swap of one crypto asset for another as a disposal. That is exactly what happens in round one: BAL goes out, other tokens come in.

Three practical points follow. First, you need the acquisition date of your BAL, tranche by tranche. Second, the arrival of the basket creates a new acquisition with a new date for every token it contains. Third, the round two airdrop is a separate event for tax purposes, and its treatment depends on the circumstances. If you want to keep your history clean, you will find suitable tools in our comparison of tax tools and portfolio trackers. For an individual case, a tax adviser is the right address; this article does not replace one.

One side effect of the long timeline: exiting a pool today may already trigger a tax-relevant event, because exiting a pool token into its components can itself be a swap. That argues for documenting the exit as soon as you make it, rather than reconstructing it the following spring.

No deposit insurance, no supervision: what applies to DeFi in Germany

Balancer is not an institution supervised in Germany. There is no deposit insurance as there is on a bank account, no compensation fund and no office at which you could file a claim if a contract behaves differently than expected. That is the starting position with every non-custodial protocol, and not something that began with this proposal. The European regulation on markets in crypto assets, MiCA for short, applies to service providers, not to contracts without an operator.

In practice that means your protection consists of your own access. As long as you hold the key to the address in which the pool tokens sit, and as long as the contracts stand, you can reach your money. Lose access and there is nobody to restore it for you. Anyone who has done everything through a single interface so far should check, by now at the latest, that they know the route without it.

How this winddown fits the 2026 deadline picture

October 30 is not the only date this autumn on which holders have to act. Several trading venues have set withdrawal windows for delisted tokens that expire in October and November. If you hold several positions in different places, the best move is to pull those dates together in one spot; our overview of current crypto deadlines collects the known cut-off dates.

The difference from an exchange delisting matters, though, and with Balancer it works in your favour. At an exchange, withdrawals end on a hard date, after which you reach nothing at all without support. With a non-custodial protocol, the contract stays reachable for as long as the chain runs. The cut-off date here shifts convenience, not access.

What we checked and what remains open

For this article we worked through the full text of the proposal in the governance forum, pulled Balancer's voting history through the Snapshot interface, and collected the market data on BAL on September 17, 2026, at 00:38 UTC. The details on dates, budgets and distribution rules all come from the proposal itself.

Three things remain open. The complete statement of assets has not yet been published, the treatment of each individual pool is only due before October 30, and the specification of the redemption contract is announced for February 2027. Until then, what the proposal itself says about the figure of at least nine million dollars applies: it is an estimate at current prices, and the audited measurement on the day of opening is what counts.

Balancer winddown: what to take away

1. Check by October 30, 2026, whether you are still in a Balancer pool, and exit while the familiar interface is still standing. Test the route with a small amount and decide in advance where the tokens go. If they are headed for your own custody, the hardware wallet comparison helps with picking the device.
2. Put the period from the end of May to the end of November 2027 in your calendar if you hold BAL. Only those who redeem in that window are in round two as well. Have the acquisition dates of your tranches to hand; our comparison of tax tools shows what keeps that manageable without spreadsheet chaos.
3. Sort out your access before the convenience goes. From November only a stripped-down interface remains, and with no operator behind you, your own key is all that counts. If you are looking for a software solution, you will find one in the software wallet comparison.

You can read the proposal in full in Balancer's governance forum; the timeline this article builds on is there too.

(As of September 17, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

The bill would exempt qualifying crypto fees from gain-or-loss calculations and restrict tax-loss deductions on tokens sold and quickly repurchased.

Meta is reportedly developing a version of its smart glasses without a camera, potentially addressing one of the biggest privacy objections to AI wearables.

An independent researcher found the agents hijacked Hugging Face accounts and mapped the platform's defenses as early as May 13—activity OpenAI's own incident report never fully described.

Chair Kevin Warsh credited Trump's economy, then ignored his rate-cut wishes entirely.

Bitcoin Core 32.0 has entered final testing, bringing faster block checks and changes to how wallets prepare payments.

Ripple’s David Schwartz exposes how the US Senate killed the landmark CLARITY Act to protect traditional bank profits, not rural economic interests.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is pushing back against fears that increasingly capable AI will make cybersecurity unwinnable.

Synapse (SYN) has returned to the spotlight after a breakout pushed the token above $0.20 intraday.

Franklin Templeton’s XRPZ continues to stand out as a steady anchor for institutional demand, pulling in $3.5M in fresh net inflows even as a broader market selloff hit XRP.

Solana, XRP, Bitcoin and Tron are facing key technical levels as short-term momentum weakens across the market.

TLDR

• Column launched four new financial infrastructure products covering stablecoins, card issuing, global banking and multicurrency accounts.
• The stablecoin tool lets businesses convert USDC and USDT into U.S. dollars and connect to payment rails around the clock.
• Column built its own issuer processor, combining banking, processing and capital into one platform.
• The global banking product lets verified customers outside the U.S. access dollar or local currency accounts and cards.
• Column says the new tools are already moving billions of dollars for fintech firms like Ramp, Brex and Mercury.

Column has rolled out four new financial products built around stablecoins, card issuing, global banking and multicurrency accounts. The company announced the launch on September 16.

Co-founder William Hockey said the release completes years of work building the pieces fintech companies need to launch financial products. Businesses can now use one platform instead of stitching together separate banks and processors.

Hockey said each product is already handling billions of dollars for fintech clients. Those clients include Ramp, Brex, Bilt, Mercury, Slash and Kapital.

Stablecoins Now Move With Bank Transfers

The first product connects USDC and USDT directly to U.S. dollar accounts and payment networks. Businesses can convert stablecoins into dollars and move funds through rails like FedNow or SWIFT.

Hockey gave an example where a company receives USDC from Mongolia. The funds convert to dollars, and part of the payment goes to a U.S. bank while another portion converts to euros and heads overseas.

He said the entire process can happen in seconds through a handful of API calls. No outside middleman is needed to complete the transfer.

The launch comes as stablecoin use in payments keeps growing. Stablecoin card spending passed $10.9 billion in total as of August, according to Paymentscan data cited by RedotPay.

Monthly stablecoin card spending crossed $1 billion in July for the first time. That figure was about $339.4 million a year earlier.

Ramp, one of the companies using Column’s infrastructure, launched its own stablecoin accounts on Solana in July. Businesses can hold USDC and USDT and pay vendors in more than 140 countries.

Card Issuing Adds Banking and Processing Together

Column’s second product gives clients access to its full card issuing stack. That includes banking, processing and capital in a single connection.

Column built its own issuer processor rather than relying on outside partners. Clients can now issue debit, credit and stablecoin backed cards on the Mastercard and Visa networks.

Visa reported that more than 160 stablecoin linked card programs were running worldwide during its fiscal second quarter. Payment volume from those programs grew nearly 200% year over year.

Mastercard added six regulated stablecoins to its settlement network in June. These include USDC, PYUSD, USDG, USDP, RLUSD and SoFiUSD.

Column’s third product extends accounts and cards to verified customers outside the United States. Businesses can offer dollar or local currency accounts using the same compliance tools built for domestic operations.

Column did not list every country where the service works. Availability depends on where its banking infrastructure and verification systems currently operate.

The fourth product adds numbered accounts for foreign currencies. Customers can receive, hold and send money outside the dollar and convert funds instantly.

These accounts connect to international networks including SEPA Instant. That gives businesses another option for cross border payments.

Hockey said all four products share the same underlying technology. That allows funds to move between stablecoins, bank accounts, cards and foreign currencies without separate integrations.

Column has not shared exact transaction totals for each product. Hockey said the tools are already processing billions of dollars for some of the largest fintech companies in the world.

The post Column Adds Card Issuing and Global Banking to Stablecoin Platform appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Takeaways

• Options traders anticipate an 11% price movement following Micron’s fiscal Q4 FY26 earnings release scheduled for September 30
• Shares have climbed 225% in 2024, propelled by artificial intelligence-driven memory chip demand and constrained industry supply
• Analysts forecast Q4 revenue reaching $50.42 billion, representing a 345%-plus increase compared to the prior-year period, alongside EPS of $31.14
• Goldman Sachs maintains a Hold stance with an $1,100 target, while TD Cowen rates the stock a Buy with a $1,600 objective
• The company has secured approximately $22 billion worth of customer commitments, featuring take-or-pay agreement structures

As Micron Technology (MU) prepares to unveil its fiscal fourth-quarter financial results on September 30, derivatives pricing indicates potential volatility of approximately 11% following the announcement. This anticipated movement exceeds the company’s trailing four-quarter average post-earnings fluctuation of roughly 8.14%, which has varied between 2.82% and 15.74%.

Micron Technology, Inc., MU

Trading near $925 per share currently, MU stock has delivered exceptional returns with a 225% gain year-to-date. This remarkable performance stems from robust artificial intelligence applications driving memory demand while supply constraints continue elevating pricing power.

Analyst consensus projects Q4 FY26 revenue will reach $50.42 billion, marking a staggering increase exceeding 345% versus last year’s comparable quarter. Earnings per share estimates stand at $31.14, dramatically higher than the $3.03 reported twelve months earlier.

To provide perspective, Micron’s third-quarter performance already demonstrated the magnitude of this transformation. The company delivered $41.46 billion in revenue versus just $9.30 billion in the year-ago period. Gross margin improved substantially to 84.9% from 39%. Adjusted earnings per share registered $25.11.

Company leadership provided Q4 guidance targeting approximately $50 billion in revenue alongside roughly 86% gross margin, figures that align closely with prevailing analyst expectations.

Analyst Perspectives and Projections

James Schneider from Goldman Sachs maintains his Hold recommendation paired with an $1,100 price objective entering the earnings event. His forecast anticipates a “strong quarter” featuring $51.9 billion in revenue, $32.54 EPS, and 87.3% gross margin. Schneider also predicts Micron will provide guidance indicating low-teens sequential revenue expansion for Q1 FY27. However, despite his constructive near-term outlook, he characterizes the risk-reward profile as equilibrium.

Krish Sankar from TD Cowen expresses greater optimism with his Buy recommendation and $1,600 price target. Sankar’s analysis suggests Micron has completed approximately 80% of its gross-margin enhancement trajectory while remaining mid-cycle regarding demand momentum, particularly from artificial intelligence applications. His Q1 FY27 EPS guidance estimate of roughly $37 surpasses the consensus projection of $35.

Critical Factors Under Investor Scrutiny

Beyond top-line and bottom-line results, market participants will scrutinize management’s outlook regarding pricing trajectories, supply-demand equilibrium, and capital expenditure within AI infrastructure. Any indication of weakening demand signals or margin compression could negatively impact investor sentiment.

The memory manufacturer has established approximately $22 billion in customer commitments, encompassing take-or-pay contract structures that provide enhanced demand transparency. Announcements regarding additional strategic partnership agreements will attract significant attention.

The fundamental question confronting investors remains: does Micron’s expansion represent a permanent structural transformation powered by artificial intelligence, or simply another cyclical memory industry upturn destined to normalize?

The Street’s collective perspective demonstrates remarkable conviction. Micron commands a Strong Buy consensus derived from 29 Buy recommendations against merely one Hold rating. The mean price target of $1,563.93 suggests approximately 69% appreciation potential from present trading levels.

The earnings announcement is scheduled for September 30.

The post Should You Buy Micron (MU) Stock Ahead of Its September 30 Earnings Report? appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Takeaways

• Federal court mandates Google reform its digital advertising auction practices and establish an antitrust compliance monitor for a six-year period.
• Court declined Department of Justice’s request to force divestiture of Google’s ad technology operations.
• Alphabet shares climbed 0.70% during extended trading hours following the court decision.
• The company plans to challenge aspects of the ruling concerning its Google Ad Manager platform.
• Analysts maintain a Strong Buy consensus on GOOGL with a $427.08 average target price.

Shares of Alphabet’s GOOGL advanced 0.70% during after-hours trading Wednesday following a federal court decision that avoided ordering the dissolution of Google’s advertising technology division.

Alphabet Inc., GOOGL

In a comprehensive 106-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema mandated that Google modify its advertising auction protocols and establish an internal antitrust compliance officer. These measures will remain effective for six years.

The decision arrives approximately two weeks following Brinkema’s rejection of the Justice Department’s proposal to compel Google to divest its advertising technology assets completely.

The legal proceedings originated in January 2023 when the DOJ, alongside multiple states, initiated litigation against Google regarding its dominance over digital advertising infrastructure. This past April, Brinkema determined that Google had illegally monopolized publisher ad server markets and advertising exchanges.

In her ruling, the judge stated the implemented reforms would be “sufficient to effectively pry open to competition the ad tech markets that were injured by Google’s unlawful conduct.”

During Q2 2026, Google produced $81.6 billion in advertising revenue. The advertising segment represents approximately 73% of Alphabet’s overall revenue stream.

Government attorneys had advocated for Google to divest AdX, its advertising exchange platform where publishers incur a 20% fee for ad placement. Brinkema dismissed this proposal, determining that enhanced access to real-time bidding information would reinstate competitive conditions without requiring forced asset sales.

Court-Mandated Requirements

The judicial order prevents Google from compelling websites utilizing its ad server to simultaneously use AdX. Additionally, the company must provide publishers with expanded data access and permit AdX utilization without requiring adoption of other Google services.

The court appointed an antitrust compliance monitor, albeit with reduced supervisory powers compared to government requests. Brinkema referenced the “gravity” of Google’s antitrust violations as rationale for the monitoring requirement.

Each party has 30 days to submit a proposed final judgment incorporating the mandated remedies.

Company Reaction and Future Actions

Google expressed disagreement with the liability determination regarding its Google Ad Manager platform and announced plans to appeal that segment of the ruling. The company had contended that dismantling its ad tech operations would negatively impact small businesses attempting to connect with online customers.

Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward Jr. characterized the result as a “significant victory” for the Justice Department and indicated the agency is evaluating additional legal strategies.

This marks the second occasion a federal judge has refused to mandate the breakup of Google’s business operations. Last September, a different judge required Google to increase competition in online search markets but declined to mandate Chrome’s divestiture.

Alphabet’s current market capitalization surpasses $4.1 trillion. Worldwide digital advertising expenditure is forecast to achieve $605 billion next year, compared to $424 billion in 2023.

Wall Street analysts remain optimistic, maintaining a Strong Buy consensus rating with an average price target of $427.08, per TipRanks data.

The post Alphabet (GOOGL) Stock Climbs as Judge Orders Ad Tech Reforms Instead of Breakup appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Takeaways

• Snap unveiled its Specs augmented reality eyewear with a price tag of $2,195, equipped with dual integrated displays and twin Snapdragon processors
• The device operates independently without needing smartphone connectivity, contrasting with Meta’s $799 Ray-Ban Display eyewear
• Specs Intelligence, an artificial intelligence platform, integrates with applications such as Gmail, Slack, and Messages
• The company is pursuing both consumer and business markets through strategic alliances with Salesforce, Nvidia, and Verizon
• SNAP shares declined 1.89% following the product announcement

Snap revealed its highly anticipated Specs augmented reality eyewear on Wednesday, carrying a retail price of $2,195. The company’s shares dropped 1.89% during trading.

Snap Inc., SNAP

The eyewear made its debut at the Augmented World Expo in June, where CEO Evan Spiegel described them as ushering in a “new era of computing.” The product is now commercially available for purchase.

Distinguishing itself from Meta’s $799 Ray-Ban Display eyewear that needs smartphone pairing, Specs functions as a completely independent device. The glasses execute applications and software autonomously, utilizing twin Snapdragon processors embedded within the frame.

The device incorporates dual integrated displays, one positioned in each lens, offering a 51-degree viewing angle and rendering capabilities for 16 million colors. By comparison, Meta’s Ray-Ban Display glasses feature only a single display positioned in the bottom right section of the right lens.

Weighing 132 to 136 grams depending on frame size, Specs utilizes electrochromic lens technology requiring approximately 10 seconds for tinting. The device delivers roughly four hours of operation per charge, extending to 20 hours when paired with the accompanying charging case.

AI Platform and Business Applications

Snap revealed Specs Intelligence concurrently with the hardware launch. This artificial intelligence system presents contextually relevant information within the user’s visual field. During one demonstration, an airport traveler queried Specs about flight information, and the device promptly highlighted a gate modification in real time.

The platform integrates with multiple applications including Gmail, Messages, and Slack, with availability extending to Mac and iPhone devices. Another demonstration showed Specs Intelligence accessing a cinema ticketing website and executing a transaction with limited user interaction.

For corporate applications, Snap has established a collaboration with Salesforce enabling field personnel to identify objects and retrieve associated data through the eyewear. The company is additionally partnering with Nvidia to deploy AI agents to Specs, enhancing workers’ environmental awareness and understanding.

A partnership with Verizon provides cellular connectivity for the charging case, though this functionality necessitates a separate Verizon data subscription.

Market Rivals and Privacy Considerations

Snap faces competition in the smart eyewear sector. Samsung and Google are developing their own wearable devices, while Apple is reportedly advancing its own glasses technology.

Snap positioned Specs as both an educational and entertainment device. The company developed applications in partnership with the NBA and WNBA to facilitate basketball skill development, golf swing analysis, and interactive exploration of three-dimensional solar system models.

Privacy considerations remain prominent throughout the smart glasses industry. Snap emphasized that Specs excludes facial recognition technology and does not continuously capture audio, video, or photographs. An LED indicator illuminates when recording is active.

Meta has encountered comparable privacy challenges. Technology journalist Joanna Stern discovered Facebook Marketplace vendors offering to disable recording indicators on Meta’s eyewear. Meta announced in July its commitment to removing such advertisements and pursuing legal remedies against individuals providing the modification service.

SNAP shares concluded Wednesday’s trading session down 1.89%.

The post Snap (SNAP) Unveils $2,195 Specs AR Glasses to Challenge Meta and Google appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Takeaways

• The Federal Reserve approved a 25 basis point rate increase, bringing the target range to 3.75%-4%, marking the first increase since 2023
• President Trump immediately called for aggressive rate cuts to 1% “or less” following the announcement
• Trump disclosed he advised Fed Chair Kevin Warsh to “vote with the board” prior to the rate decision
• The entire 12-member FOMC panel, including Warsh, voted in favor of the rate increase
• Fed officials indicated expectations for at least one additional rate hike by the close of 2026

President Donald Trump is mounting pressure on the Federal Reserve to slash interest rates to 1% or below, mere hours following the central bank’s decision to implement its first rate increase in three years.

The Federal Open Market Committee reached a unanimous decision Wednesday to implement a 25 basis point increase to its key interest rate benchmark. The new target range now stands at 3.75% to 4%.

This marks the initial rate increase since 2023 and represents the first such action under Fed Chair Kevin Warsh’s leadership, a Trump appointee.

Trump’s response was swift and forceful. Taking to Truth Social, he demanded immediate Fed action, declaring: “LOWER THE INTEREST RATES FOR THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND FAST!”

Speaking with journalists, he elaborated that US interest rates “should be 1%, or less, because we are the Best Credit in the World.”

President Confirms Pre-Vote Discussion With Fed Chair

The president disclosed that he had communicated with Warsh before the FOMC vote. Speaking to the press, Trump stated: “I talked to Kevin and I said, ‘You might as well vote with the board because it’s not going to matter.'”

When questioned about any presidential communication during his press conference, Warsh refused to elaborate, simply stating: “I’ve got nothing for you on a discussion with the president.”

Warsh stood by the rate increase decision as justified. He emphasized that Fed independence operates as a “two-way street” and pledged the institution would maintain its proper role.

While Trump expressed continued support for Warsh, he criticized other FOMC members as “a bunch of politicians” pursuing misguided policies.

“They’re raising the rates to make Trump do as bad as they can possibly can do,” the president claimed.

Administration Questions Fed’s Rationale

White House spokesman Kush Desai characterized the rate increase as a “rather unfortunate decision” lacking “a particularly compelling economic case.”

Desai maintained that Trump respects Fed independence while asserting the president retains his First Amendment right to voice concerns.

According to the Fed’s latest forecasts, a majority of policymakers anticipate implementing at least one additional rate hike before year’s end. The FOMC’s official statement noted that inflation “remains elevated.”

Just under two weeks prior, Trump issued warnings about potentially severing trade relations with nations maintaining trade surpluses with the US if the Fed refused to reduce rates. This category encompasses most major US trading partners.

Democratic lawmakers quickly seized on the rate hike to criticize Trump’s economic agenda. Rep. Brendan Boyle characterized the increase as “further proof that Donald Trump and Republicans have failed on the economy.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren contended that absent Trump’s economic policies, the Fed would likely be considering rate reductions rather than increases.

The post Fed Raises Rates Despite Trump’s Push for 1% Cuts: What You Need to Know appeared first on Blockonomi.

Bitcoin and crypto markets turned volatile on Wednesday after the US Federal Reserve raised interest rates by 25 basis points. The Fed lifted its target range to 3.75%-4%. The move was widely expected, but BTC still briefly dropped below $75,000 before recovering to around $76,400.

Analysts remain divided on what could come next.

BTC Recovers After Fed Shock

Doctor Profit dismissed the bearish reaction. According to the analyst, Bitcoin’s bottom was already in at $57,000. He also said he is holding the BTC he bought between $60,000 and $64,000 and has no plans to sell. Earlier, the market commentator had pointed to $71,000 as the market’s “max pain” level while maintaining a bullish outlook toward $88,000.

Meanwhile, Ali Martinez also said he is prepared for another sell-off. While identifying Bitcoin’s Short-Term Holder Realized Price near $71,200 as a major level to watch, the analyst explained that he would consider that area a potential accumulation zone if BTC falls further.

Santiment, on the other hand, flagged a sharp rise in social discussions around the FOMC, interest rates, and the 25-basis-point move as the meeting approached. Bitcoin was already facing several pressures before the rate decision.

The crypto asset’s price pulled back after the previous day’s CLARITY Act setback. ETF outflows, higher Treasury yields, and liquidations had also added to the pressure. The bigger issue now is whether this rate hike remains an isolated move or becomes the start of another tightening cycle. The Fed’s latest projections point to at least one more hike in 2026. That keeps future policy decisions in focus for crypto traders.

One More Hike Remains in Focus

Santiment noted that traders had recently considered much more aggressive rate-hike scenarios. The latest projections provide a less aggressive baseline, with another 25-basis-point move effectively at the center of the current outlook.

For Bitcoin, the next phase will therefore be about expectations around future Fed policy. Softer inflation, lower energy prices, or weaker economic data could change those expectations. However, persistent inflation could push them in the opposite direction.

“The bullish case is that traders had already priced a much uglier path, the first hike is now behind us, and one additional move may prove manageable if inflation finally begins cooling. For crypto, the direction of expectations from here could matter far more than the 25 basis points that just arrived.”

The post Bitcoin (BTC) Reacts to Fed Rate Hike: Analysts Split on What Comes Next appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Bitcoin’s expected price volatility ahead of and after the FOMC meeting indeed took place, with the asset posting a few major moves, but it has overall survived the first rate hike in three years, currently trading above $76,000.

The altcoins are also well in the green today, with SOL touching $100 and ZEC exploding by over 14%.

BTC Above $76K as the Dust Settles

The current business week was expected to be a big one for the cryptocurrency industry, and it was quite eventful, even though it’s far from over. At the end of the previous one, BTC plunged to $76,000 after the release of the CPI data, before it suddenly rocketed to almost $80,000, where it was rejected and driven south to $77,000. It spent the weekend there and dipped again on Monday to $76,500.

However, the bulls went on the offensive later that day and pushed the cryptocurrency to $79,500. Another rejection followed as the market braced for the upcoming cloture vote on the CLARITY Act. The Senate vote ultimately failed, and BTC went from $77,250 to a month low of $75,000 in minutes.

It recovered to $76,000 on Wednesday as all eyes turned to the Fed. For the first time in three years, the US central bank raised the rates unanimously with a 12-0 vote. At first, BTC dipped to $75,000 before it shot up by $1,500. It failed there again, slipping by a grand before it rebounded and now sits at $76,500.

Its market cap has recovered to $1.530 trillion on CMC, while its dominance over the alts has retreated slightly to 58.7%.

ZEC Flies Again

Ethereum is up by just over 1.5% daily and sits close to $2,450. BNB has posted a similar increase, currently trading at $725. SOL has neared $100, while XRP, TRX, HYPE, DOGE, and LINK are also in the green. ZEC stands in a league of its own again. The privacy token has rocketed by over 14% and now trades above $1,350. In contrast, RAIN has plummeted by nearly 8%.

NEAR, CRO, PUMP, UNI, CC, DOT, ENA, and ONDO are well in the green among the larger-cap alts, with gains of up to 14.6% in the case of NEAR.

The total crypto market cap has increased by over 1% daily, and it’s up to $2.610 trillion on CMC.

The post Bitcoin Survives First Fed Rate Hike in 3 Years, Zcash Explodes Again: Market Watch appeared first on CryptoPotato.

XRP’s recent 70% rally may have had an early on-chain signal. Santiment found 85 new wallets holding at least 1 million tokens appearing just two days before the August 17-21 surge.

That matters because these larger wallets can absorb supply and strengthen bids while shifting liquidity faster than retail traders. Changes in their numbers have often appeared ahead of XRP’s sharpest moves.

Millionaire Wallets Were Already on the Move

There is also more happening around the XRP Ledger. Ripple backed an RLUSD credit fund focused on fintech and payments lending on XRPL. ZILO and Licuido investments brought tokenization plus transfer-agency and collateral-mobility rails into Ripple’s stack.

Looking toward the rest of the year, Santiment considers the setup to be constructive. Whale wallet numbers remain high, while RLUSD adds settlement utility and institutional tokenization gives XRP a story beyond retail hype.

Separately, AI is also moving further into Ripple’s treasury operations. Just last week, the company announced expanding GSmart to handle a wider range of work for enterprise finance teams. The new capabilities cover forecasting, liquidity, risk, reconciliation, and reporting, and are already being used by Ripple’s enterprise customers.

Despite the gains it had made previously, XRP took the biggest hit among major cryptocurrencies following the Senate’s failure to move the CLARITY Act forward. This is a major blow to an industry that has spent years pushing for a comprehensive US regulatory framework. Over the past day, the token has shed more than 8%.

The broader crypto market was awash in red by Tuesday afternoon as well.

Bullish Setup Takes a Hit

Crypto analyst Diana said XRP could face further downside after the token lost the $1.34 support level and fell quickly toward $1.26. The move weakened its earlier bullish setup, which had pointed toward the $1.70-$1.78 range. The bulls now need to defend the $1.24-$1.26 area.

If that level fails, the analyst said that $1.14-$1.10 could come into focus, followed by the $1.00 mark if XRP drops below $1.1. Diana also flagged that its one-hour RSI had fallen close to 21, which put the token in deeply oversold territory. That could trigger a short-term bounce.

On the institutional front, US-based spot XRP ETFs continued to attract capital. So far in August, they have raked in over $43 million in inflows. If the trend continues, these funds could extend their inflow streak to 10 consecutive weeks.

The post XRP’s 70% Breakout Had a Warning Sign: 85 Millionaire Wallets Moved First appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Trader Matthew Hyland says Bitcoin is sitting at a daily cycle low with a bullish divergence forming on the charts, and he’s calling for prices above $90,000 by early November.

He’s making that call even as BTC trades near $76,000, down sharply since the Senate failed to advance the CLARITY Act, and while most of the market’s loudest voices are still leaning bearish.

One Analyst Sees a Bottom, Bears See a Trap

Hyland posted on X that bears were getting excited right at what he considers a daily cycle low, with a bullish divergence setup forming underneath the price action.

“See ya at $90k+ by early November,” he wrote.

Swing trader Roman replied, “Yeah, part of me really thinks this was a low,” with Hyland acknowledging that the RSI could fall further, although he pointed to liquidity around $75,000.

“So far it was just a liquidity grab IMO,” he stated, adding that there was “not really much liquidity below” that level. Additionally, he said current prices look solid to him, even though most bears still aren’t buying it and are hoping for a much deeper decline.

That view runs against more pessimistic calls on X, including from analyst Ted Pillows, who pointed out that BTC has lost its 50-week EMA and wrote that “a drop to $70K-$72K zone is highly likely before any reversal.”

Fellow market watcher Crypto Patel has been calling the bearish move since Bitcoin fell from $82,500 to about $74,900 after being rejected near an $83,000 bearish order block on the daily chart, and he’s holding a $50,000 target unless Bitcoin closes above $83,000 on a higher timeframe.

Meanwhile, CryptoQuant contributor IT Tech took a different approach, focusing on Bitcoin holdings rather than price structure. They pointed out that the 6- to 12-month supply band has climbed to 30.8% of realized cap, up from 16.2% in December last year, a pattern that lined up with the last three Bitcoin bottoms.

The analyst called it a bullish setup but stopped short of calling it the cycle low outright, noting that the OG cryptocurrency is still down nearly 40% from its peak and that “this reads as mid-cycle floor building, not the cycle low.”

Bitcoin’s Price Action and the CLARITY Act Fallout

BTC was trading near $76,000 at the time of writing, down about 1.5% in 24 hours and nearly 5% over the past week, although it’s still up close to 19% across 30 days.

The drop follows Tuesday’s Senate vote, when cloture on the CLARITY Act failed to gather the 60 votes needed to move the bill forward. As CryptoPotato reported earlier, Bitcoin short-term holders sent more than 23,000 BTC to exchanges at a loss in the aftermath, worth close to $1.8 billion, marking the largest capitulation event in about a month.

The post Analyst Says This Setup Could Send Bitcoin Above $90K by November appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Solana is holding a major support area even after its latest correction. After reports that the CLARITY Act failed to advance in the US Senate, the crypto asset took a plunge from over $101 to under $96 before a minor recovery.

Ali Martinez found that 72 million SOL previously traded around this level, which makes the zone significant.

Other Signals

Institutional demand is also strengthening through US spot SOL ETFs. It has now recorded nine straight weeks of net inflows, and more than $200 million entered these investment vehicles over the past month. Almost $28 million in inflows were recorded in August alone.

At the same time, exchange supply continues to fall as more than 3 million SOL have been withdrawn from exchanges during the same period.

Network activity remains elevated as well. Solana reached a peak of 12 million new addresses on September 11, and it is still adding roughly 10.8 million new addresses each day. According to Martinez, these factors – the strong support level, ETF demand, lower exchange supply, and continued network growth – indicate that the current correction could be short-lived.

Solana has been seeing growing activity from tokenized stocks, especially after traditional markets close. CryptoRus recently said that 63% of the network’s tokenized-equity activity happens after Wall Street closes. There are now more than 727,000 holders. Additionally, Solana’s TVL rose more than 18%, from around $4.82 billion to roughly $5.7 billion.

Corporate treasuries are building exposure too. DeFi Development Corp. now holds about 2.39 million Solana tokens and SOL equivalents after adding 55,491 since August 27. It has also established a $300 million at-the-market program for its CHAD perpetual preferred stock.

Most of the proceeds will be used to purchase more of the crypto asset. CHAD carries an initial annual dividend rate of 13%. DeFi Development Corp. recently restarted regular purchases of SOL and now has the second-largest Solana treasury, behind Forward Industries.

Volatility Incoming?

Despite the recent choppy price, SOL is almost 30% up over the past month. Market watcher Ella believes that a move back above $100 would take some pressure off the crypto asset. The focus should be on reclaiming $102.5.

However, if $95 breaks, the price could fall toward $93-$94. With the Fed decision still ahead, Ella expects volatility to pick up.

The post Solana (SOL) Correction or Short-Lived Dip? Here’s Why Bulls Aren’t Giving Up appeared first on CryptoPotato.